Everything you need to know about German consulting firms' websites

In September we were joined for a week by Alice Moore, who was about to head off to Oxford University to read English. Her main task involved assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of consulting firms' websites, making her now (among other things) the world expert on how German consulting firms present themselves online (seriously, who else has ever spent an entire week looking at nothing else?).  Coming to this as a non-consultant, we suspect her views reflect those of clients.  Here's what she had to say...

Knowing little about consulting, and even less about the German language, the task of ploughing through the websites of around 200 German consulting firms is a daunting one. This is the first experience I’ve had with research of any kind, and although the results of my search through the mazes of Xing.com (a kind of Teutonic LinkedIn) were probably useful to very few people, I have had the opportunity to assess the online presence of a great number of companies in the German consulting market as a complete outsider.

In this position – despite my ignorance – I am probably not completely unlike the average client, who would, naturally, use a company’s website to find out, at a glance, what it is exactly that they do. One would accordingly suppose that firms would go far to ensure their websites’ visuals are sleek and content is clear.

Not so, apparently. The best sites have some kind of ‘About Us’ page that makes it immediately clear what it is they specialise in, what makes them different, what makes them appealing to work with. This sounds like a reasonably axiomatic requirement, but a surprising number make it incredibly difficult to work out exactly what it is they do well, perhaps in an effort to make their abilities seem all-encompassing, instead opting for generic phrases: ‘We have many years of consulting experience’, they boast. ‘We put our clients’ needs first!’ Oh, good.

To my amusement, this effect is magnified when the sites in question are translated by the Google Chrome browser, in the absence of an English version of the text. A personal favourite reads, ‘The customer and his needs are the trigger of all value streams. He pulls the processes in which the material flows. The eye controls the factory by selective seeing and learning. Man is the central success factor.’ Similarly bizarre is the proclamation that ‘the goals have eyes, are high’, which I can only assume is a variation of ‘we envision the future’, and serves to illustrate how hollow these phrases actually are.

Even more immediate than the text itself, perhaps, is the way in which it is presented.  In fact, I have found the most immediate indicator of a firm’s tone is their choice of font. Companies with a tech focus frequently invest in title sections they could easily have stolen from the poster of a science fiction movie, while a more classic, Times New Roman-esque typeface says, ‘we are very distinguished’, and is usually accompanied by ‘executive’ somewhere in the company name. There are other ways to look serious, too; a few websites have featured home pages with high-resolution images of grave looking men in sharp suits staring into the distance, because nothing says ‘professional’ like a good frown.

In all seriousness, although we’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover, presentation does, of course, make an irrevocable first impression on a reader. Consider, for example, the website of Dark Horse (http://www.thedarkhorse.de/index-en.html); almost all the companies I encountered placed emphasis on innovation and creative thinking, and quite a few claimed to have a large component of young, forward-thinking consultants, but Dark Horse’s fun, colourful graphics illustrate this visually, which counts for a lot when everyone is claiming to have more or less the same skills.

I find myself similarly enamoured with any site that has a straightforward and snappy opening sentence: ‘CORE is a think tank specializing in IT transformations’; ‘Redpoint is a specialist in the management and optimization of complex value chains and supply chains.’ Thank you, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Then again, perhaps I’m being too demanding. I am, after all, part of a generation who learned ABC on a computer screen.  In any case, my research being limited to very small companies, maybe it is to be expected that the paint is less glossy than that of the Ferraris of the consulting world. But a good website seems like a good investment to me – synthesise precise text and sleek graphics and your company is – or at least looks – instantly more impressive, and I can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t do it.

If you’re stuck, just use a stock photo of frowning men. Particularly effective.