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Consultants – Heal Thyself!

shutterstock_135699662I’m fresh from Content Marketing World where I taught a workshop to 200 or so agencies who came to learn about the methodologies of delivering content marketing planning services to their end clients.  I can tell you that the primary thing on their mind was how rapidly the changes flowing through digital content experiences, social, search and the measurement of success was disrupting their business. Despite the fact that most were incredibly busy, they were all worried about their futures.

Couple this with two other recent articles. The first is a new article in Harvard Business Review from Clayton Christensen, Dina Wang and Derek van Bever called “Consulting On The Cusp Of Disruption”.  In that article, the authors point to the large firms being disrupted by smaller, more focused freelancers, firms and other niche solution companies.  As they say: “Although these upstarts are as yet nowhere near the size and influence of big-name consultancies like McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the incumbents are showing vulnerability.”

The last example I’ll bring in here is a study from the Association of National Advertisers published earlier this month. They found that brands are reporting that they are actually building “internal agencies” to handle new, disruptive marketing functions such as digital, social and mobile in more frequency. In fact, “58% now utilize in-house agencies, a 16 percentage point increase from 2008”.

My experience is that all of these things are true – but interestingly (and maybe a bit ironically), I don’t find any decrease of outsourced “doing” services due to these “internal agencies”.  In fact, quite the opposite, I find that these internal agencies are outsourcing just as often – but more to the boutique, niche services and freelancers that I mentioned above. In short: the big guys are being disrupted by the little guys and the little guys are being disrupted by the guy.

Clients Are Consumers Too

When we discuss the benefits of CEM (Customer Experience Management) we often talk about how the forces of digital disruption are changing the way that everyone accesses and consumes information. In fact, my colleagues at DCG say this (as usual) incredibly eloquently in our Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management when they say:

“Consumers are empowered by information and shared opinions, and they are emboldened by choice. They have developed an appetite for rich and rewarding interactions, and they rarely hesitate to seek alternatives when disappointed. Increasingly, companies will succeed and fail according to the quality of the digital experiences that they offer.”

But lest we forget – clients of consulting services are consumers too. The information and data that Armani-outfitted-consultants hide behind glass skyscrapers, or resides in the iPads at the Hipster-SOHO-exposed-brick Web agency is just as democratized as the facts on the used car for sale down the road.

The difference is in the solution of course – and how rapidly the services provider can help their clients adapt to these same disruptions.  This, ironically, is what Christensen and his co-authors found as the most common objectives to their findings.  Some consultants they found “scoffed at the suggestion of disruption in their industry, noting that (life and change being what they are) clients will always face new challenges.”

I can tell you that, while at the surface that sentiment is accurate, my experience is that these skeptics may find themselves on the wrong side of Christensen’s famous Dilemma.  I’ve had a few conversations over the last three months from classic Web Agencies, Ad Agencies and even Systems Integrators where the basic sentiment is “yeah, our strategy and planning work is decreasing – but we’re getting more ‘production’ work so we’re okay till things turn around.”  Yeah, good luck with that.

As Christensen himself says in The Innovator’s Dilemma, “Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.” The smart agencies I speak with are in full-on disruption mode themselves. They are finding ways to disrupt their current operating models, learn new methods and figuring out how they themselves will deliver new, optimal customer experiences.

Where are you?


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