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Dearly beloved marketers, we are gathered together today to ponder

that burning question: are advertising people masochists? And if not,

why do they worry themselves sick about problems which aren’t

problems?

For years, agency panjandrums have been wittering on about the lethal

threat of management consultants. They whinge that consultants are

stealing the bread from their mouths. Consultants, they fret, will be

the death of them. It’s all twaddle.

Management consultancy has unarguably been booming. The consultancy

industry - if that phrase doesn’t offend you - was effectively born in

the 80s, and by 1996 the world’s top 30 consultancies had an estimated

turnover of pounds 19bn. In the same year, 97% of The Times 200 largest

companies were using consultants, and in the previous five years the

British government had spent a mighty pounds 2.29bn on their services.

Worldwide, there are about 160,000 people working in consultancy.

Manifestly, many top executives now feel they cannot get by without

it.

Compared with advertising this is still small beer. Some pounds 250bn

was spent on advertising globally last year. Nonetheless, consultancy

turnover represents impressive growth from a standing start. The

question is, what proportion of that relates to advertising and

marketing? Brilliantly clever though we agency guys are, there is

precious little reason for clients to consult us about their IT

requirements, or raw material purchasing.

The sole area in which clients might, possibly, consult agencies would

be marketing communications.

Unfortunately, estimates of the amount clients spend with management

consultants on marketing projects have been hard to come by. The data

which have now come to hand are a tad rough and ready. But a recently

published good book by Martin Ashford about management consultancy, with

the silly title Con Tricks, publishes the results of a survey which,

among other things, asked clients what they use consultants for.

Extrapolating from this data I estimate that about 3-4% of consultancy

projects are devoted to ’marketing’. This suggests that maybe 4000-5000

of consultants globally are working on marketing projects at any one

time - perhaps a few hundred in the UK. And they are working on

’marketing’, not just advertising. So the revenue advertising agencies

are losing is titchy. And anyway some of it already goes to agency

groupies like Henley, which is part of WPP.

Having said which, Mr Ashford’s book contains much salutary advice.

Management consultants are now facing many of the same problems as

agencies: only 28% of their clients think ’consultants are good value

for money’, and only 24% think ’consultants are good at coming up with

original ideas for their clients’, while a whacking 75% grumbled that

’consultants are better at fleshing out clients’ ideas than at

suggesting new ones’. Despite admen’s masochistic fears, everything in

the consultants’ garden is not quite coming up rosy.

Winston Fletcher is chairman of the Bozell UK Group.