HASHTAGCONSULTANTSLASHTWITTERSLASHBRAND

I’ve been thinking about three things this week. The legitimacy (or otherwise) of consultants, Twitter and why branding works.

Let’s start with the proposition that we are a parsnip. As such life would be dull. Being an Essential or an Aldi parsnip would be a horrid fate. But imagine you were a Pershore Purple  and better still an Organic Pershore Purple Parsnip (notice the capital letter in “parsnip”) and all would be so much better.

Because language matters,especially when it comes to branding.

But it’s my inability to cope with just 40 characters and the new language of today which is crazy sparse and not easy for someone of my age to ship with. Twitter and I know each other, of course, but we exchange just curt nods

Until this week when the absurd Omnicom/Publicis ad agency merger collapsed in a crash of what I hear is over £60 million of advisor fees.  Here are just three of the tweets I saw:

“Damn. Omnipube was best name ever.” 

“Omnicom rolls over, blinks, stares perplexedly into the sleeping face of Publicis, thinks: My head! Where am I? I remember Champagne...”

“This whole failed Publicis Omnicom merger was like two magnets with the same polarity trying to attract each other.”

And here are those very magnets.

So now I get it. Brevity is the soul of wit and this blog already much too long.

Finally consultants or “people who are unemployed” as my mother used to describe them. I saw this quote from the splendid Erica Jong and felt myself nodding:

 “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.”

I believe in advice, I believe in asking others for help but the Job Centre for the unemployed is not necessarily the best place to go to find it. So back to branding.

I decided to create my own mega-merger of three consulting companies I set up in my head called McFinsey, Paine and Company and the Hoxton Consulting Group thus, at a stroke, in my lurid imagination creating the biggest consulting group who are proficient in - wait for it - strategy, leadership and change management. That should do it.

As the week rolled on I had two conversations - one about HR. 

“Aren’t we delegating management to this dubious department? You have a tricky people issue…call in HR (not)” and the second was about marketing. Someone said they had a large marketing department and I heard a voice saying:

“Why? Why would you do that - tie up all that fixed and probably mediocre cost when you could go out and shop for talent?”

It was my voice. Me, who’d spent a third of my life in marketing in a big companies. Yet marketing is an expensive investment when the brand (that very Pershore Purple of a thing) should be owned by the CEO and the board. 

Call in consultants with talent but just make sure they have a capital letter and brand name attached. And remember this - consultancy is a “thing” now.

www.colourfulthinkers.com