Laws of BRANDING a CONSULTANCY

Most consultancies are good at selling, but not at branding. In other words, they do a very good job of rounding up prospects and making presentations to sell their services. On the contrary, they do an abysmal job of branding. To build a brand, Consultancies have to stand for something in the mind and need to position them in such a way that they differentiate from others. Advertising could be a good way of branding your firm, but its importance comes only after public relations. The big 4s don’t differentiate from each other; all of them claim to be the best accounting firms but nothing more than that. More than the service you provides, it’s your credibility of service that matters in the market. Position something which is unique to your organization only. Similarly, take the case of Wipro, Infosys, TCS or Cognizant, everyone has a catchy punchline but that doesn’t reflect the kind of work they do or position themselves unique to each other.

PR is generally a more effective branding strategy to establish a position in the mind. After that position is established, and then you can switch to advertising to maintain the position. To build a successful PR strategy, consultancies need a unique position that they can use to try to get into a prospect's mind. They might, for example, pick out a segment of the market that they are the leader in and then position themselves as the leader in that category. If they are not the leader, they need to position themselves as the “alternatives” in the market which can give them the best services as good as the leader. Good publicity requires a lot of time on the part of internal people and sometimes the hiring of expensive PR firms. The major cost of PR, both internally and externally, is the cost of the people involved. Most of the other expenses are relatively minor.

Naming a consultancy is a critical area which has lot of importance in branding the consultancy. Ernst and Young, Mc Kinsey, Bain consulting, do these names trigger an alarm bell?? Yes, you are right; they are named after the owners of the company. That’s the way you brand your company and yourself too. Bigger names are a disaster, so use smaller ones to brand them.