Actually, UK clients might not be so cynical after all

By Edward Haigh

I wrote a piece about the UK consulting market recently (Mind the (closing) gap) in which I suggested that UK clients were a cynical bunch when it came to their views about consultants. I may have got that a bit wrong.

My assertion followed the publication of our UK consulting market report (available to buy now, by the way) and was based on data from the report which told us that UK clients were less comfortable than their counterparts elsewhere about turning to consultants for help. The bouyancy in the UK market was, we suggested, largely a factor of clients having cut back on their own internal resources to a point where they had no choice but to use consultants.

But the idea that their reluctance was driven by cynicism turns out to be questionable. Subsequent research into clients' perceptions about consulting firms in the UK (also available to buy now) actually finds them saying some fairly nice things about consultants. Take, for example, what they say about fees: in inviting them to tell us what they thought of consulting firms (each chose three to comment on) we asked them whether they'd be willing to pay more, would prefer to pay less, or thought current fees were about right. Pouring over the data about individual firms was, as you might expect, pretty interesting work, but equally interesting was the story that emerged when we looked at the aggregate picture, because 52% of clients were telling us that they'd be prepared to pay more.

Not much more, necessarily, but, in a market that's generally reckoned to command some of the highest consulting fees in the world already, anything more is likely to raise eyebrows. Indeed, it's a figure which looks all the more interesting when you compare it with responses from all the markets in which we carried out the same research (the US, Germany, France, the Nordics, the UK, the GCC) across which the average who said they would be prepared to pay more was just 36%.

That certainly seems to pour water on the theory (yes, OK, largely my theory) that UK clients are hardened cynics when it comes to consulting. And yet the evidence that they're trying not to use consultants is frankly pretty clear, so what's happening here? The answer may be perfectly pragmatic: it's possible that UK clients are either trying to reduce the amount they spend on consulting (in fact that's likely) or feel that they have the capability to do what they need to do in house (equally likely, even if they don't always have the capacity). But at the risk of positing another theory when I've just attempted to disprove my own, I'd like to suggest that something else is coming into play here:

If UK clients are happy enough with consultants that they'll admit to being prepared to pay them more, then what's making them reluctant to use consultants? My new theory is that it's to do with the importance, not of what the client themselves think, but of what they think everyone else thinks. In other words UK clients are worried that using consultants is going to be frowned on by other people (colleagues, bosses, shareholders and even, in the case of the public sector, taxpayers) to the extent that they try to steer clear of doing so. They're not cynical themselves but they're certainly worried that everyone else might be.