The reputation gap cuts both ways in the UK consulting market

By Alison Huntington

It’s always slightly creepy when you meet someone new and they say, “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Oh god, you think as a cold sweat forms on your brow, what on earth have you heard about me? Not the tale of that office Christmas party? Or could they have heard good things that you now need to live up to? The impression people form before meeting or working with you can help or hinder your relationship, and can take a fair amount of effort to change it.

And it’s the same for consulting firms. In our UK client perception study, we ask what we call ‘indirect clients’ (for which read: prospects) their opinions of the consulting firms they’ve seen working within their organisations. These may not be the principal buyers of consulting projects, but they’ll be senior and keenly interested in what these consultants are up to. The opinions of indirect clients matter because these people are potential future buyers of consulting – a pool of prospective clients to which consulting firms have relatively easy access, since they’re already working within their organisation.

What we found is that the impression made on these indirect clients varies hugely by firm type. Strategy firms have a reputation for high quality capability among their indirect clients: 83% describe quality as ‘high’ or ‘very high’, and only 2% hold a negative opinion about the quality of these firms.

Great! Except that this is a very high billing to live up to, and when direct clients – those who’ve recently worked with the firm – have their say, they’re not always convinced that strategy firms manage to pull off the trick of doing so. Nearly one in five clients describe the quality of strategy firms’ capability as ‘low’ or ‘very low’, and there’s a smaller proportion of direct clients than indirect clients who think these firms offer high quality. It means that when a strategy firm converts an indirect client to a direct client there’s a small but significant minority of clients who are disappointed with what they’ve bought.

The Big Four have the reverse problem. It’s not that indirect clients have heard awful things about them, they’re just far more likely to think of these firms as average. Well over half (58%) of indirect clients of the Big Four describe quality as ‘average’, while only around a third (36%) think the firms offer high quality capability. Yet, if you talk to their peers who are direct clients, there’s a huge shift in opinion. Direct clients are actually pretty impressed with the quality offered by the Big Four: 63% describe capability as high quality, and only 2% are negative about quality. It means that once hired, these firms do better quality work than is expected, and that the Big Four are currently missing something in the way they’re talking about quality with their prospective clients.

Reputation management is a tricky business, and it cuts both ways; an outsized reputation can leave clients disappointed, while a negligent approach has many obvious downsides -- the most potent being that it damages a firm’s chances of winning engagements. Strategy firms need to ensure they live up to the prestige associated with their names, while the Big Four need to do something to make sure that when an indirect client says, “I’ve heard a lot about you” it’s because they’ve been told about the stellar quality of the work they’ve been doing.