A challenge to the consultants

Let’s get something straight. Procter & Gamble may be desperate to improve its margins, but it’s not going to do it by moving into management consultancy. Not, at least, of the Arthur Andersen – sorry, Accenture – variety.

Yet what it does plan to do with the enigmatically-named Project EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management) is no less intriguing. EMM has nothing to do with ‘suits on planes’, for whom senior P&G executives have a degree of contempt. Instead, the project will concentrate on what P&G pompously calls “monetising our marketing knowledge”.

This knowledge, to put it mildly, is compendious and P&G is intent on exploiting it to crowbar its way into a $10bn software market. The marketing world is crying out for templated (or even customised) best practice marketing processes. P&G is streets ahead of any management consultancy in this field and reckons it has found the perfect route to dissemination of its knowledge through a (junior) partnership with Silicon Valley-based Worldwide Magnifi.

Despite having signed up Coca-Cola and Philips as recipients of its expertise, the jury is out on whether P&G will succeed. While, indisputably, certain universal rules can be applied to implementing, for example, an ad campaign or corporate identity, it is doubtful whether one company will ever have a monopoly of best practice. Still less, that it would wish to share its intimate details with competitors. In any case, what may be appropriate for one company’s corporate culture could well seem Stalinist in another’s.

But the EMM initiative is interesting for an altogether different reason. The ‘suits in planes’ are regrouping for a fresh attack and P&G, albeit for its own selfish corporate ends, is raising the marketing standard against them. It is saying, in effect, that the battle for the chief executive’s ear is not a lost cause. There are chinks in the management consultant’s armour and savvy marketers can exploit them. Chief among these is the perception that management consultants are rarely expert at brand communication, but hell-bent on selling their (stupendously expensive and dogmatic) valuation methodologies to clients.

Some marketing services companies have belatedly woken up to the opportunities. For example, Chris Ingram’s Tempus made a shrewd move when it acquired marketing consultancy Added Value, signalling in so doing that there was a lot more to its offer than media expertise. But Tempus, and others who have done likewise, will need to convince clients that they are not simply paying lip service to consultancy.

Because, make no mistake, the management consultants will not be caught napping. McKinsey made a highly significant acquisition when it bought brand consultancy Envision the other week. And equally interesting, though in a slightly different way, was Accenture’s decision to stake new media agency AKQA’s development as a global network.

see “MW200102010091”; “MW200102010082”