Who is a consultant? A person who has the required knowledge, resources and professional expertise to provide professional advice in a particular work profile or industry. We need consultants in various spheres of your life – health care, legal, risk compliance, asset management and even to choose the right customisation for your new four-wheeler.
Let’s look at a scenario. Imagine, one not-so-fine day, you are sued. You hire a lawyer. The lawyer is expected to engage in a few meetings with you that will prepare him for your case and help him represent you in the court of law. Would you ever think of starting your negotiations with, “So, let’s see what your line of argument is and we will see if we wish to commission your services.”
Crazy, right?
Let us see what happens in the media industry, especially in agency structures. A team of expert marketing strategists churn out their creativity to come up with a good strategy. If the client likes it, the agency is commissioned to execute this strategy. In earlier times, not a lot of data points were available, so intuition helped decide whether a marketing campaign will fly or sink. And, the above procedure worked fine.
However, with rapid advancements in technology, the media landscape has transformed significantly. Today, users are exposed to approximately 5000 pieces of promotional material and advertisements on a daily basis. And this is not through a few channels. Almost everywhere you go, your senses are bound to be modified by everything you consume from the smallest snippet of content to the streaming of a film. Noise is increasing and as “The Social Dilemma” will tell you, we know a little too much about the consumer today.
So, there is little space to undergo a marketing disaster. And yet it is rampant. Why? Let’s revisit the above structure.
What happens when you don’t pay the lawyer? He doesn’t work for you. What happens when you don’t pay for marketing strategy? You get half-baked ideas. Because creative or not, manipulating a mass audience or personalising a message for each user – both require an immense amount of research and data analysis and billable expert hours – none of which come for free.
So, when an industry is expected to give all of the above for free, there will be an obvious dearth in quality. There is simply not enough resource to put into acquiring a customer, especially when the profit margin is as slim as it is in the media industry. A good campaign is no more one that wins at the Cannes Lions. Today, a good campaign is about finding a formula that has worked. But it is needless to say that a good formula can only be achieved with an immense amount of research and the right investment in the right expertise.
Interestingly, there exists a good solution that is rampant in the western world – communication consulting. You pay for the advice (read: strategy) and then you pay for the execution. Consulting firms advise and agencies execute. Consulting firms can also be hired for both advice and execution if they have the right team of experts.Agencies can also provide advice although they must necessarily execute because implementation experts make up most of their workforce.
It is a well known fact that it is almost impossible to make a product visible, let alone successful by doing the basics anymore. Your product will not take off unless you are Kylie Jenner. So, if you know that marketing is a sureshot way to boost your growth, why not take a leap of faith and invest mindfully in both the strategy and the implementation stages of the process?