We discuss whether China can produce top management consulting services. This type of management consulting service brand and other management consulting service brands can generate double or even several times the premium on similar management consulting service content. In my articles "Enterprise Services Business Model | How Professional Services Companies Can Thrive (Part 1)" and "Enterprise Services Business Model | How Professional Services Companies Can Thrive (Part 2)", I have pointed out that the two types of high-end consulting, "grey hair" and "rocket technology", should have different value propositions, product positioning and operating models from "homogeneous" and "programmed" enterprise services. The former corresponds to top luxury goods, and the latter corresponds to mass consumer goods:
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car
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Fashion
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food
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consumer goods |
Volkswagen toyota Chery
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Uniqlo Anta OPPO mobile phone Huawei watch |
Bestore coca cola Master Kong iced tea |
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High-end consumer goods |
Audi bmw Mercedes Benz NIO
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Nike Archaeopteryx ralph lauren iphone Omega watch |
starbucks coffee Evian mineral water |
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Top luxury goods |
ferrari Porsche
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Hermès Chanel LV Patek Philippe watches |
Moutai TWG tea small pot of tea Bamboo leaf green |
To consider the differences in luxury goods, let’s take the field of fashion as an example—fashion can be divided into three types:
1. Luxury fashion
With a long history, it has always been at the top of the fashion industry. If this "old money style" corresponds to the field of management consulting, it is based on classical management theory, or organizational management practices derived from mainstream values, China's very large enterprises and power institutions.
2. Industrial fashion
With the rapid development of chain fashion retail after the 1980s, a series of brands with ultra-modern and industrialized design and product management have emerged. They use data analysis, marketing and supply chain methods to actively control and guide fashion trends. If it corresponds to the field of business management, the entire "Huawei craze" is a representative of industrial fashion.
3. Street fashion
The popular styles of young people in poorer suburbs abroad, that is, in China's fourth-tier cities and small towns, will also affect mainstream fashion design, such as foreign punk and hiphop, and China's grassroots styles such as shamat and Northeast large-flowered jackets. If it corresponds to the field of business management, categories such as "positioning", "amoeba" and "points system" belong to street fashion.
If management consulting is to sell at a premium, it needs to have a luxury and fashionable positioning, and not fall into industrial fashion or street fashion.
Luxury goods have high value and high profile brand associations, which enable people to associate the product with upper class society and celebrities. The characteristics of luxury goods are:
Scarcity: only serving a few people, limited supply of resources
Exceptional quality: handcrafted or using unique raw materials
Extraordinary experience:Whether you buy or use it, it can stimulate all kinds of experiences (listening, touching, seeing, tasting, etc.) that transcend the ordinary.
Cultural inheritance:Inheriting noble traditions has eternal value that is not affected by time. It does not follow fashion. Even if it is innovative, it is rooted in long tradition.
Maverick:It is far away from the mainstream and even slightly eccentric, matching the unique personality and preferences of users; several "insulting incidents" of Chinese models on the Internet regarding luxury brand promotions are actually conflicts in popular culture caused by the aesthetic style of luxury goods.
Anti-Utility: Deliberately avoiding “useful” features and functions in a product
If it corresponds to management consulting services, the luxury characteristics of top management consulting should also be reflected in:
1. Scarcity: Management consulting is a service provided by people. The most direct way to measure and the easiest way to measure the scarcity of human resources is academic qualifications. This is why top consulting companies abroad only recruit graduates from top business schools.
2. Excellent quality: Top consulting companies have a production and quality assurance system that goes beyond ordinary companies and strives for excellence. The delivery quality is directly controlled by the partners, rather than by the project manager like ordinary consulting companies.
3. Extraordinary experience: Top consulting companies focus on customer experience, whether it is visual presentation or thinking collision, bringing extraordinary physical and mental experience to customers
4. Cultural inheritance: Top consulting companies have very strong cultural genes that even resist change.
5. Maverick: Top consulting companies place great emphasis on “customized” solutions for customers, which is to ensure that customers have a sense of exclusive respect.
6. Anti-practicality: This proposition seems a bit strange at first glance. Why doesn’t the consultation emphasize application? In fact, consulting is centered around the CEO's agenda, and the CEO's agenda must be kept alienated from the operational level. This is a subtle and sensitive feeling in corporate politics. Only in this way can the value of consulting be ensured.
If you look at this issue from the buyer's perspective, different types of consumers have different priorities in purchasing motivations. The picture below is only about strength. Top-level luxury goods emphasize brand belief (what some people joke about as the "IQ tax" and willingness to pay brand premiums unconditionally), status bragging (purchasing top-level luxury goods means You have entered another identity community), while high-end consumer goods emphasize the inspection of functional quality and self-reward (such as professional commemorations of promotions and salary increases, or life commemorations such as birthdays and weddings, buying yourself a high-priced, high-quality product, but not emphasizing showing off the product):
Top management consulting has the characteristics of luxury goods, and it is necessary to study the motivations of buyers from the perspective of the brand belief and status display of the purchasing company: Although most top consulting companies pride themselves on serving only industry leaders, this cannot stop some ordinary companies from spending a lot of money to hire top consulting companies in order to give themselves a boost - at least it is a self-reward; however, top consulting companies are often unwilling to serve these companies, for fear of lowering their own brands.
Related articles:
Fundamentalist Management Consulting Values | Is consulting a profession or a business?
Since MetaERP, the localization of high-end management consulting will also begin.
Change Management Consulting | The commanding heights of the industry that ERP localization must capture
History of Management Consulting (3) | How Professionalism Became a Business Weapon of Management Consulting Firms
The Gilded Age of Consulting | A look at the management consulting industry in 1960
The origins of the modern management consulting industry
A series of videos on reflections on opportunities in China’s high-end management consulting market:
Machine-translated from the Chinese original 顶级管理咨询 ｜企业服务行业的奢侈品 (published 2024-02-22). WeChat original ↗