| | By Mick James
Marketing has always
intrigued me as a
consultancy area. On the
one hand, the marketing
director is simply
another manager who may
or may not need
management consultancy
advice. On the other,
marketing managers face
their own universe of
professional advisers in
the form of PR, marketing
and advertising agencies.
And many of the business
areas that marketing is
deeply involved with are
crucial to the highest
level of business
strategy.
So we have an area
where agencies, business
consultants and strategy
houses intersect, yet
often appear to operate
in parallel universes,
speaking different
languages and operating
according to their own
disciplines.
For Robert Diamond,
founder and chief
executive of Diametric
Consulting, that point of
intersection is the
“sweet spot” where his
consultancy is
positioned.
“We see the levers of
growth as brand,
consumers and channel,”
he says. “If you operate | |
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| | of how to achieve growth
in the business,” says
Diamond. “At the same
time the marketing
consulting community they
face is highly
fragmented. If I need to
answer a business problem
– I’m not selling enough
stuff – where do I go?
There are so many
potential partners.”
The problem is that
each partner will see
whatever their discipline
is as the answer: ”an
advertising agency will
say you need an ad
campaign, but a business
has a lot of moving
parts,” says Diamond.
Worse, this can
sometimes be accompanied
by a lack of respect for
the all round
professionalism of the
marketing manager.
“We never
underestimate the
marketing manager – these
people do this as their
day job,” he says. “You
must never think you know
more than them. Their
challenge is that they
don’t have the resources
or the bandwidth to think
about the systemic
structural problems that
can step change their
business. We see
ourselves as an extension
of the marketing | |
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| | department – we can get
them where they want to
be faster.”
Diametric’s
broad-based approach
means that they encounter
different competitors
according to whether the
project is biased towards
brand, consumer or
channel issues.
“Where we work best is
where consumer behaviour
is seen as the
fundamental driver,” says
Diamond. “That is how we
sew together consumer,
brand and channel. We do
get that with our biggest
clients, but that’s a
case of cause and effect
– it’s what makes them
our biggest clients and
gives us the biggest
impact.”
Delivering this
approach means that
Diametric seeks
individuals with both
broad experience and a
substantial hinterland.
“There are three or
four things we look for,”
says Diamond. “We want
people who are very
academically strong, and
we want people with
specific skills in brand,
channel management and
consumer analytics. We
also want people with
very strong and relevant
experience, a healthy | |
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| | dollop of which should be
on the client side.”
As a result recruits
tend to come from
backgrounds with such
major commercial names as
Procter & Gamble,
Unilever, Kraft and
Johnson & Johnson.
The main criteria,
though, is what Diamond
calls “commercial
curiosity”.
“We ask people: would
you like to hold three or
four marketing managers’
jobs in a week?” he says.
“Some say yes, that would
be very stimulating,
others say no. We don’t
take the view that good
business people become
consultants and bad
business people stay
where they are, but we
are fairly ruthless and
we only hire the best.”
As a result, hiring
good people remains one
of the main constraints
on Diametric’s growth.
“The deal breaker for
us is the personality
fit,” he says. “We have a
very strong culture – it
doesn’t mean everybody is
the same – but the
clincher for us is that
commercial curiosity.”
| |
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| | at that level, you can
step down into the
specifics of any of them.
But if you work in, say
an advertising agency,
it’s not so easy to step
up that ladder.”
For Diamond, creating
a consultancy that can
talk about these issues
at a holistic, business
level is the only way to
address the problems of
an increasingly
hard-pressed and
undervalued individual –
the marketing manager.
Diamond sees marketing
managers as increasingly
stuck between a rock and
a hard place. Marketing
budgets are usually set
on a “business as usual”
basis, yet the problems
they are asked to solve
are often far from
day-to-day.
“They are not
resourced against those
very complex challenges | |
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