Marketing Consultants

According to them, a consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually works for a consultancy firm or is self-employed, and engages with multiple and changing clients. Thus, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for them to retain in-house, and may purchase only as much service from the outside consultant as desired.

The site defines marketing as:

"Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities are informed or persuaded that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.

Marketing is used to create the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that Marketing is one of the premier components of Business Management - the other being Operations (or Production). Other services and management activities such as Human Resources, Accounting, Law and Legal aspects can be "bought in" or "contracted out"."

Although it is perfectly correct, this is a rather dry definition of the topic. Another more dynamic definition is explained by Prof Philip Kottler in this video starting off with the mantra CCDVTP.

So essentially a marketing consultant is an expert in one or more aspects of marketing, who trades as a third party, to offer his expertise and advice to help the organisation achieve it's objectives.

What Do Consultants Do?

There are as many business problems in the world as there are different approaches that consultants take. Most consultants have frameworks, models and methods that they use. They will have developed and tested these methods over the years as they have grown their consultancy business. However, every company is different and part of the consultants skill is to vary his approach to the situation in hand.

It is possible to define the four main contributions that a marketing consultant will make to any organisation.

1 They address a marketing problem. Marketing consultants are invariably called in to fix a problem that has emerged. Sales may not be growing as fast as they did, or profits may be reduced and putting pressure on cash flow.

2 They provide extra resource. In most organisations, everybody is fully employed and consultants add resource to allow additional work to be done.

3 They provide an external perspective. Marketing consultants are both external experts and they are not caught up in the history or the politics of the organisation. Their expertise and fresh perspective can mean that their points of view can be more readily accepted than that of those who are closer to the problem.

4 They offer advice or deliver a solution. Early marketing consultants would have tended to offer advice only, but the trend since the 2000's has been for consultants to also deliver a solution.

The Marketing Consultancy Market

In the UK, it is estimated that there approximately 900 marketing consultancy companies, although reliable data is very hard to come by. There are several reasons for this. The first is that this is an unregulated industry and anyone can call themselves a marketing consultant. The second is the transient nature of the market. In times of recession, people who are made redundant often choose to call themselves consultants and take on part-time work while they are seeking permanent employment. Even those who do attempt to run a marketing consultancy very often fail and most do not last more than two years.

The majority of consultancy companies are operated as a single person business and they will operate within a region and they will target SMEs. Although they will offer to work throughout the country, they rarely have the resources to promote themselves effectively outside of their local business community. Their target customer group will be early stage businesses that are growing well, but could benefit from the additional resources and the blue-chip training that the consultant will generally have had. This is an attractive lifestyle proposition for consultants who want to be their own boss. The downside is that the market is quite crowded, with a lot of suppliers chasing a small band of growing businesses.

There are no national marketing consultancies in the way that there are national accountancy or legal consultancies. Some speculate that this is because advertising agencies take on that role. Others comment that the reason is because marketing is not one uniform discipline. The point is that accounts are generally produced in one format, while B2B and B2C marketing are completely different disciplines. Neither of these points offers a compelling explanation and some commentators recently have questioned whether the sector is mature enough to have the confidence to consolidate at the scale required. Perhaps a case of physician heal thyself.

Approximately 170 businesses are marketing consultancies which consist of more than one consultant and who target businesses with a turnover of over £10million. Our business, Level 3 Marketing is in this category.

Marketing Consultants Versus Advertising Agencies

Smaller marketing consultants are generally business advisors who specialise in marketing. The clients that they serve would not be of much interest to advertising agencies. Also the range of activities that they would undertake would be far broader than an agency could undertake, given the size of the customer.

There is more overlap between more developed consultants and ad agencies. Their customers overlap more and so do the services that they offer. Marketing consultants have an edge in offering advice and support when new products or markets are involved. Their skills will generally help them to build a rapid picture of a new product or customer group and to recommend a successful approach. Ad agencies tend to work on promotional campaigns where existing brands and products need to be promoted. Of course, there are variations to this rule and much depends on individual needs and relationships.

Where the marketing issue is not related to promotions, then the marketing consultants will normally be the preferred approach. Examples could include departmental re-organisations, introducing new marketing measurements, processes or systems, or forging stronger links between sales and marketing.

Marketing Consultants Versus Interims

An interim manager is external expert, appointed on a limited contract, to manage some or all of the parts of an organisation. There are similarities between interims and consultants and some consultants offer interim marketing services. The differences between interims and consultants are generally:

- consultants are considered to be outside the organisational structure, while interims are not. Interims will attend management meetings, they will have performance reviews, and they will be expected to report as if they were employees.

- the duration of an interim contract is defined by time. Interims are regularly required until a permanent replacement is found. Consultants, on the other hand, are usually required until a project is completed.

- interims are responsible for managing the people in their department in the way that a permanent manager would.

The skills required by an interim vary with the type of organisation, but there is more focus on people skills and political awareness than there is in consulting. The skills that they have in common include project management, problem identification, change management and rapid prioritisation and decision making.

Qualifications To Become A Consultant

The bulk of the market for marketing consultants consists of single person operations, targeting SMEs. The better operators are seasoned specialists who have worked at a senior level in one or more blue-chip companies. Generally, those who have had strong careers in employment also go on to succeed as consultants. Also those who been average performers in employment are often not a success in consultancy.

There are opportunities for junior consultants in larger firms. Typical qualifications would be a marketing degree and/or a professional qualification. Most firms would expect at least two years client-side experience as a minimum requirement. Working in a marketing consultancy early in your career can bring you rich experiences because of the variety of markets and situations that you will experience, but it often needs to be complemented by the training, development and the in depth knowledge that comes with spending 4-5 years in one market leading marketing department.

How To Find A Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants are relatively easy to find. If you search for "marketing consultant", "marketing consultancy" or "marketing company" in any of the main search engines then you will be presented with a range of choices. In some search engines you will be able to choose between local search results and national consultancies. The local results will offer you a choice of local businesses, mapped to show where they are located. Links to their websites are often given, but unlike the normal search results, you do not need a website to be listed as a local business. If you look on their websites, you can get a reasonable idea of their capabilities and a sense of the type of business they might be.

The main search results will show the marketing consultancies as ranked by the search engines. This list will offer you a choice of businesses of different types and sizes for you to chooses from.

There are websites, that will select several consultants for you, depending on the nature of your project. They maintain a list of consultants with a variety of backgrounds and they regularly monitor the quality of the work that they do by obtaining client feedback. If you contact these sites with details of your marketing project, they will select two or more consultancies who match your requirements and they will put you in contact with them. These businesses will provide you with a quotation and you can decide if you would like to work with them. The sites receive fees from the consultants and offer their services to the client free of charge. An example is top marketing consultant selector.

Managing A Marketing Consultant

The basis for a good relationship between a consultant and client is a full understanding of what the client wants and of how the consultant aims to provide it. If sounds obvious, but it needs work and experience to achieve. A good marketing consultants will provide the client with a full written outline of the project before any work commences. This outline should include a summary of the business situation, an outline of how the project will be managed, a summary of the resources that will required and the timescales involved. The resources should include the costs of the consultancy work and also any requirements from the client's business.

The client should study the project outline from the consultant and should make sure that it matches their requirements. Do not assume that you can add things later. This is the exact specification of how things will work and you need to mention any additional requirements that you have at the outset.

The other elements of maintaining an effective relationship with a consultant are reporting and disclosure. Both rely on a strong relationship between you and your main contact at the consultancy. You need to be completely honest with your marketing consultancy and you need to expect the same in return. The alternative becomes glaringly obvious very quickly and it never helps the relationship. You need to insist on a strong reporting structure from your account manager. Of course the project plan needs to be discussed in detail, but you also need to review the business results that the marketing programs are achieving. Be clear in advance who will provide this business data.

Good managers do not always make good consultants, and managing relationships along these lines are where they most often fail. Everyone wants consultancy projects to succeed, but they sometimes don't. Hence the need to select a marketing consultant who has the specialist skills that you require, but also is someone that you feel that you can work with.

Marketing Consultancy Fees

The massive fees charged by the large strategy and accountancy consultancies are the stuff of legend. They also colour the views of most people about what marketing consultants cost. Even among consultants, people talk about " not working for less than £600 per day", not knowing that this doesn't mean much. You can see the following rates quoted:

             Strategic Projects - £1000 to £1500 per day
             Smaller Projects   - £500   to £750  per day
             Public Service      - £350   to £550  per day

What makes these rates meaningless is that is still leaves the number of days charged as a variable. I regularly get quotes from a telemarketing business and they charge a rate of £250 per day. A competitor of theirs charges £400 per day, but they bill for an 8 hour day, while the other business bills for four hours. So don't focus on the day rate - it can be misleading.

At Level 3 Marketing we have two principle when it comes to fees:

1 No hidden charges - we specify everything upfront, including expenses.

2 Value - we will not undertake a marketing project unless we can deliver more in value for our client than we charge in fees and we will specify this in our project specification. That way, we are always good value for money, and we get a lot of repeat business.

Comic View Of Consultants

Consultants of all types have always inspired humour among business execs and marketing consultants are no exception. Take a look at this marketing blog post which has a video that should make anyone in our business cringe.