Brand

By Alison Huntington.

We’ve written before about the ‘magnetic middle’ effect, in which clients of consulting firms struggle to differentiate between firms based on the quality of their work alone. Very little separates the top-rated firms from the bottom-rated ones, with firms deliberately making acquisitions and investments to ensure they provide the full suite of services their clients need to a high standard. If this is the case, why are we even talking about quality anymore?

Well, looking at how individual firms performed this year versus last in our annual survey of consulting clients* shows that there’s no room for complacency, particularly when it comes to digital transformation. Firms may have ended up scoring very similarly to each other for the overall quality of their work this year, but some have taken great strides forward in digital, while others appear to be moving backwards.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Consulting firms have spent millions of dollars in the last few years to associate a specific set of values with their overarching brand. Quality, integrity, expertise, global reach: All the traditionally big ideas in professional services have been linked to one firm or another, or even to all of them. And firms have hoped that, by doing this, they’re having an impact not only on what their clients think but also on how employees and prospective employees see them. In the war for talent, brand is a big gun.

But it’s also a fairly indiscriminate gun. Consulting firms have already found that a firm’s brand doesn’t necessarily help it sell specific services, where messages about quality, integrity, expertise and global reach pale into insignificance when faced with the need for a concrete, “killer” solution that no other firm can boast.

By Edward Haigh.

A colleague of mine said something that shook me to my marketing core the other day.

We were talking about the bike ride from London to the Loire Valley that a few people from Source will be undertaking in September and for which she, along with another colleague, will be driving the support vehicle. Bemoaning the fact she had to spend a weekend in the proximity of men wearing lycra (a prospect apparently not sufficiently offset by the chance to spend the weekend in northern France eating cheese) she consoled herself by saying: “At least I get to drive your Land Rover and don’t have to drive some crappy Skoda or something."

Kadunk.

Some crappy Skoda? Let’s get a few things on the table at this point: My colleague was born in 1990. One year later, Skoda, which had hitherto been owned by the Czechoslovakian state and had the sort of reputation you might expect from a publicly owned car maker from Eastern Europe, began a process that would take it towards privatisation. In 2000 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, which had the sort of reputation that German car makers have. Which, putting recent scandals delicately to one side for the moment, is somewhere up there with Michaelangelo’s reputation for decorating ceilings, or Einstein’s reputation for having an idea. It’s what us Brits would call “rather good”.

At this point in Skoda’s history, my colleague was 10. Like most of her generation, I don’t believe that she has anything other than a passing interest in cars today, so it seems a reasonable bet that she couldn’t have cared less about them when she was 10. In other words her exposure to Skoda’s poor reputation would have been fairly limited.

In the years that followed, Skoda embarked on a campaign designed to make everyone realise that by buying a Skoda they were basically buying a VW for less money. And, by and large, the car-buying public seem to have bought into that. But if, 18 years later, my colleague still thinks of Skodas as “crappy” then my guess is that she’s far from alone. After all, they haven’t been crappy for at least two-thirds of her life.

As a marketer it’s a fairly depressing thought that 18 years of advertising to someone who’s still only 27 isn’t enough to change perceptions of a brand. But neither is it completely unfamiliar. The current iterations of the advisory businesses of EY, KPMG, and PwC have been going for only slightly less time than Skoda has been making good cars, and Deloitte’s has been going for longer. But we still regularly hear clients say that they’re “just a bunch of accountants”. No, they’re not! They’re a whole lot else besides. What on earth do these firms have to do differently to change people’s minds?