Management consultants and creatives are fundamentally incompatible
The fundamental differences between management consultants and creatives mean the two are intrinsically incompatible. If you’re not careful, you’ll be left with a hole in your pocket and a 200-page ‘best practice’ deck lying dormant on your hard drive, warns Chris Howatson.
I believe we are entering a period of marketing renaissance. Data and technology are enabling a more intimate understanding and connectivity with individuals. The CMO has returned to the C-suite, experience is accepted as the most influential contributor to customer satisfaction and organisational awareness of brand and customer value is growing with each passing quarter.
Like all periods of transformation, incumbents are displaced and new offerings emerge. Of great interest through these major transition periods is how businesses adapt to the new needs of the world and, with it, the new competitors they suddenly face.
Like agencies, management consultants are redressing for the needs of tomorrow’s addressable world and now both find themselves in a contest to win ownership of the customer experience.
Chris Howatson doesn’t believe the hype around consultancies
Despite the recent hype, my observation is that management consultants have a very long way to go until they can legitimately make any rightful claim to the customer.
Every organisation I talk to has, at some point, engaged a management consultant for customer experience insight. And all they have to show for it is a hole in their pocket and a 200-page ‘best practice’ deck left dormant since the day it was presented.
The management constancy model of ‘love and leave’ is valuable when offering discrete advice in support of commercial sizing, restructures and process optimisations, but consultants haven’t realised that which agencies have always known.
When it comes to the field of marketing, strategy is only as valuable as the execution. This truth is best described by British advertising great Sir John Hegarty: “Advertising is 80% idea and 80% execution”.
Consultants are assessed on the advice they give. They provide legitimacy to major investment decisions and protection to those who make them.
Agencies, on the other hand, have always been assessed on the performance they deliver: our ability to translate business strategy into ideas and experiences that fill the shopping cart.
Critically, agencies make stuff. It’s hard coded into our DNA. And celebrated in our culture. So much so, no agency person ever feels truly purposeful until there is market evidence of his or her efforts.
The most valuable service an agency provides is translating commercial insight into human insight from which behaviour-changing work is inspired and then created. This requires a deep understanding of the creative process and – in their nativity and oversight of this process – this is where management consultants will always fall short.
Management consultancy firms are, of course, aware of their limitation; hence their acquisition fervour for design, development and creative agencies in recent years.
The Monkeys (pictured) has recently been acquired by consultancy firm Accenture
But the acquisition of a few agencies doesn’t create a scalable capability, and the mixing of different people doesn’t create a customer-centric creative culture.
Agencies also understand that share is won by communicating, learning and pivoting at pace – in a state of always-on, constant optimisation – operating with agility, demonstrating grit and hustle in the daily battle to service the customer, while also transforming the organisation in the process.
There is no time to stop, invest, transform, reprocess and start afresh. That’s the fastest way to be displaced.
And so, while management consultants provide enormous value to big business when it comes to investment advice and endorsement, when it comes to communications, be very wary.
Management consultants work with a theoretical “should”, whereas agencies launch actual work into the market one day and learn a very non-theoretical “does” or “doesn’t” the next day. And we pivot immediately – with gusto, enthusiasm, accuracy and creativity.
Challenge the management consultant’s genuine understanding of the customer. Challenge their ability to think creatively. Challenge their ability to execute. And challenge their genuine interest to own and manage in real time the outcome, positive or disastrous, once their strategy is alive in market.
Chris Howatson is CEO of CHE Proximity
Disagree. Both creatives and management consultants have their foibles, but to insist that they are fundamentally incompatible is to take away the human part of the equation. There will be the rare few from both sides who will figure out how to work with each other, and the resultant solutions may prove to be more efficacious than those from either group alone. Time to let go of the creative-versus-suit mindset.
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Poorly thought out article. I’m not sure about the author’s experience and work history, but he’s obviously out of touch with the current consultancy landscape.
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Chris, I get this is an op-ed piece but that doesn’t mean it should be fact or data free. You are a smart guy and I have great respect for you and the work you drive at CHE, but you’re just plain wrong here mate.
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This really is an ill informed article. It shows little understanding of the challenges businesses face on the client side let alone the agency side. Being on the agency side I have found that the influence of agencies waned with the explosion of channels and fragmentation of agency services. The rise of CRM, Digital, Social, Promo agencies left clients to pull together the end to end marketing solution. Now clients are facing an all together different challenge – survival. The answer lies in the combination of what both consultancies and the good agencies do – linking the business strategy right through to the brand strategy and executing it in a way that inspires customers to act. That will be helpful to clients and will be worth paying good money for. To think these two things cannot coexist is just naive.
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Thanks Andy, appreciate your feedback. The headline is somewhat misleading and atagonistic – it wasn’t my original. I’m confident there are plenty of examples contrary to my points above, but my article is a true and accurate reflection of my experience on every single client over recent years – that is, a consultancy has delivered a recommendation on ‘best in class’ customer experience which is never operationalised beyond the deck. Especially not into trigger based experience programs that serve as the revenue engine of the business. This doesn’t include you (if you’re Andy H) – you’re a marketing consultant. Management consultants do brilliant work. That’s not my challenge. My challenge is they’re not well positioned to service the customer experience like the modern agency is, because they are not built for always on execution.
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Totally disagree with your comments, many a management consultant has saved, repaired or grown a business for a long time now. With the advent around the creative social media space businesses are more confused than ever. Unfortunately every one is getting sucked into the “get more leads boom” from creative creators.
Management consultants are here to stay to help businesses that have caved in from the pressure of get leads quick schemes
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Did Rob make you write that? Do you really beleive what you’ve written? have you stepped inside a management consultancy lately?
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This reads like someone who is paranoid consultancies are threatening the incumbent privilege of his agency. Why agencies come out and do these proactive hit pieces on any competitor or threat is beyond me.
Sweeping generalisations are part of the reason some clients are looking at other options. Hoping chris doesn’t apply the same sample size of one thinking to his own client base and the work chep does for them.
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As a client who has worked alongside both management consultancies and agencies, I think that this is a really interesting question. My personal experience of Management consultants is that the smartest ones are generally ‘whale hunters’. They’re looking for the big multi-million project that is going to help them in their individual quests to attain partner status in their own organisations. They get excited about large-scale business transformation projects and are excellent at delivering these. Although the truth is that a ‘transformation’ by its nature has a beginning and end.
The managed services offerings I’ve seen (generally around the tech space) tend to be based around low-cost, off-shoring models… so they’re not really delivering the same kind of IP benefits that you get in the big ‘whale’ project. My experience has been that these models are more based on cost-to-service than interesting output.
In terms of creative services, it’s really early days. Whilst I’ve seen some amazingly smart distillation of business problems, great financial modelling and action plans, I’ve never seen work from a management consultancy that has given me an emotional response. So whilst I don’t think there is evidence that this new trajectory can’t work, I haven’t seen any evidence that it can either.
I had a very interesting conversation with a Management Consultancy leader at a conference recently about the future of agencies vs. Management Consultancies. He talked about the fact that the problem with the agency model (from a growth perspective) is that it isn’t scalable… because it’s all based around the IP of a Creative Autocrat. Management Consultancies work in more of a hive-like model… compiling teams based on project needs.
Whilst this makes Management Consultancies more flexible in terms of being able to deploy resource at scale around complex problems, I would challenge whether it recognises how the creative process really works.
Creative industries are driven by mavens… chief designers, film directors, head chefs, editors, writers… these are not committees of people, with great predictive models based on quant research. They are mavens acting on gut and instinct, because they have a vision for what could be… not what logic dictates should be. Creative agencies that succeed take years to build up trusted partnerships between strategists and creative teams to finely balance the logic / magic equation. That’s where I think the cultural rift will ultimately prevent these acquisitions from working effectively. The Cadbury Gorilla campaign failed research… The Heineken Policemen campaign failed research… would a Management consultant have made these campaigns?
Maybe the Monkeys thing will work, but if you see the office walls of the creative leadership team filling up with coloured Post-it notes… then you know the experiment has failed.
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Happy to take this offline Chris and share with you many case studies of build and delivery on CX. It’s Andy Bateman, by the way.
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This is quite possibly the most sensible, balanced, well-thought-out comment I have read in a comment thread all year.
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The other comment I would throw into the mix is that the ‘Management Consultancy/Creative Agency’ model with its high overheads and high hourly rates is only really suitable for larger corporate clients who have the money to pay for it all.
In my experience, mid-size corporates and below are looking for more and more ‘strategic’ as well as ‘creative’ solutions and that provides agencies with the opportunity to ‘swim upstream’ and provide these services too, providing they have the people and know how to do so.
Interesting times and, as they say, fortune favours the brave.
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Chris, although a contentious and provoking POV you raise, I would have to agree.
The management consult role/model is undisputedly relevant when helping businesses with making major, macro business decisions (restructure, commercial sizing etc.). It is equally ill equipped to be advising on the ‘executional’ detail quite simply due to the fact this demands ongoing, high-touch attention only an agency model can deliver.
Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a role for mgmt. consultants, but with a predominantly fly-in-fly-out model they can’t possibly deliver on the longevity commitment needed to execute businesses marketing needs.
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Interesting piece which has obviously provoked many.
From experience I’ve seen management consultants called in to fix problems that businesses internally should be able to fix themselves. High paid senior leaders who want someone to document how things can be better and claim their work is done.
When investing large amounts of money into management consultants it is your responsibility to execute the recommendations put forward. That 200 page document can be scary but you know what? it will reveal a bunch of stuff that you as someone working in your business does not see or will not acknowledge.
Why? that’s because you are too worried about looking bad and damaging your own credibility, people may see, people may talk – oh no.
This is not to say there aren’t challenges with management consultants. they can generally be broken into three buckets; academics, ex-company leaders who abruptly exited struggling businesses and then those who are undoubtedly amazing performers and operators – sadly the third type are rare.
Agencies should be scared by management consultants, it’s like the people businesses don;t want because they aren’t afraid to tell them what’s what, and straight up.
The problem here is fundamental, if the business models of businesses were more robust, flexible and scalable then the demand for management consultants would be lower.
Why can;t we all go back to be comfortable with failing and do a good job – walk not talk
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What Chris T said. Intelligent, informed and excellent read.
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This comment is better than the original opinion piece.
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You can tell when your agency has been taken over by a consultancy firm, all of a sudden there’ll be a bunch of nerdy nerds dressed super corporate making awkward small talk around the kitchen with all your fly looking agency pals
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What baloney. As a single data point, 4 of the 5 largest digital agencies in the world are owned by the big 4 consultancies.
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Agree with others here that this is a most cogent comment.
With regards the strategist/suit and creative equation, there was a time not long ago when these two cohorts were at loggerheads within the agency culture – mostly driven by creatives who felt that suits ‘didn’t get the idea’ or ‘couldn’t sell it in to the client’ – regardless of whether the creative solution might or might not have been valid.
But with the flourishing of data analysis tools, the suit has been in a better position to justify an objection or suggest relevant changes. The forward-thinking creative takes this input on board, and lets it inform their work.
While no amount of pre-testing would validate – let alone create – ‘gorilla’ or ‘policeman’, what we now have is a more efficient path to delivery of message through-the-line (in old-school parlance) thanks to the granular parsing (in buzz-speak) of channels in the real-time feedback loop of the digital environment. A brilliant idea delivered brilliantly. Both parties win.
I can’t stress enough how strong the antagonism was between creatives and suits – I was there in some of the top agencies when it was prevalent (and guilty of perpetuating it myself in the past). If these two cohorts have been able to find common ground and build success on a shared-input model, then I don’t see how the right agency-types and the right management consultant-types can’t find that common ground in the future.
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…this article isn’t about whether management consultancies can buy stuff. Of course they can. Anyone can buy stuff. It’s whether the cultural fit between the cultures will allow the creative output to continue to flourish… or whether over time, all the cool kids that did the interesting work will leave as they feel stifled by oppressive financial justification and ROI modelling behind everything they do.
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Bugger. You stole my thunder.
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A major benefit of consultancies is risk management, not only due to their wider industry insights and experience than their clients, but also the reputations that come with them so decision makers in organisations don’t have to take complete ownership if things go south.
The most effective communications leverage emotion (check out research from Peter Field if you need convincing), which is not black and white. So a very different approach to risk management is needed to produce them.
I agree with ‘The Client’ when they said “I’ve never seen work from a management consultancy that has given me an emotional response.”
Adding capabilities to an organisation is straight forward (when you have deep pockets) but changing cultures and engrained behaviours is ambiguous. Will be interesting to see how The Monkey’s acquisition plays out…
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Don’t forget the money. Management consultants are accustomed to billing premium hours in a way that agencies never have – especially over the past 10-20 years.
Put simply, there is a lot of business that, unless they’re expecting clients to pay more than they do now, will simply not be worth chasing for the big consultancies.
I know one that bills a local bank $40m a year (revenue) just on assorted ‘stuff’. How many of our glamour agencies bill even a 10th of that off their biggest clients?
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