Marketing in consulting firms: accountability without authority

Want something done? Establish a clear set of objectives, set aside a budget, pull a team of people together, and let them get on with it. Unless, that is, you’re dealing with the marketing department of a consulting firm.

Earlier this year, marketers and their bosses in around 30 consulting firms were kind enough to give us their views on a variety of issues about marketing. It was an important exercise because consulting firms are indeed setting aside very sizeable amounts of money for marketing and pulling together armies of people to spend it. What the results show, though, is that the one thing consulting firms aren’t doing is letting them get on with it.

The chart below ranks various marketing activities in terms of their effectiveness. The nearer to the right something is, the more effective it’s deemed to be, so thought leadership is seen to be by far the most effective tool, and brochures the least. But the size of the bubbles are crucial. What they indicate is the extent to which marketing teams are empowered: advertising, press coverage, brochures and newsletters are all things that marketing people have control over, while account management and regular meetings with clients aren’t. Although there are important exceptions—notably thought leadership—the message is clear. Marketing people have most control over the things that matter least; or to put it another way, most of the things that matter most, aren’t controlled by marketing people.

Why is this? Why hand over money to people you don’t trust to get on with the job? Our research suggests a couple of reasons. The first is that the marketing activities on the left are easier to measure. Social media? Great: it’s really easy to see how many times you’ve been re-tweeted. The problem is that everyone—marketers and partners alike—think social media is a waste of time. By contrast, regular meetings with clients are massively important, but incredibly hard to track. The second is that marketing people, by their own admission, care more about the views of their internal stakeholders than those of their prospective clients (almost twice as many people survey the former than the latter). That’s not the marketing team’s fault: we know from previous research that most marketing people aren’t allowed near clients, so it’s hardly surprising that their focus is internal.

We’d suggest that consulting firms should do one of two things. They should either stop putting money and resources into something they don’t believe in, at least in its current form. Or they should start letting the marketing function do what it’s there to do—marketing.