What consultancies can learn from potatoes

Buying a potato is simple, right? You go to a shop, pick up a spud, pay for it, and you’re done.

But that’s how it always happens. Sometimes you buy one potato. Sometimes you buy a bag of them. Sometimes a sack. Then there’s variety. Some people buy plain old baking potatoes. Others will buy Maris Pipers or King Edwards. Foodies might opt for heritage varieties, or different coloured ones, or sweet potatoes.

And still we’re not at the end of the choices available. You might buy oven chips instead of potatoes. But what kind? Fries or chunky chips? Wedges? Peeled or skin on? Curly fries? Smiles? Alphabites? Or why bother with an oven at all? Why not get microwaveable chips? Or just go to the chippy and buy steaming hot, fresh out of the fryer chips?

There are many more potato options, but let’s stop here. The point is that for whatever type of potato product you want, it’s out there. Someone is producing a potato in whatever form you want.

Producers will tightly specify the types and form of potato they’re selling and then market them very specifically. They’ll talk about the benefits, whether that is crisper chips, better flavour or convenience. By clearly defining their offer, they make it easy for customers to understand what’s being sold.

But consultancy isn’t potatoes, is it? It’s bespoke. Consultants treat each client differently, providing a solution based on a client’s needs. You can’t define it like a potato.

Well, it’s true that services can be harder to define. But harder doesn’t mean impossible. You can define which sectors you support. You can say which services you offer. Many consultancies think they do this, but what they actually do is list every possible sector they could work in and every conceivable service a client might want.

Many consultancies, whether they’re offering PR or legal advice, shy away from tightly defining what they do because they’re scared of losing potential clients. But this fear leads to an opaqueness that deters customers.

It manifests itself in two ways. One is the long list of services and sectors on consultancy websites. These lists are supposed to show clients you work in their sector, but actually they’re just hard work. Who wants to look through a list of 20 things to see if what they want is on it?

The second manifestation is bland language. We’ve all seen consultancy websites dripping with industry-specific jargon. The tell tale sign is often an opening line describing a firm as “leading”. A potato would never be described to customers as leading because a potato knows what it is.

Modish proponents of Purpose have distilled snake oil from a worthy idea.

From its noble beginnings, Purpose has fallen. Like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), good intentions have not become good deeds. But, whereas CSR was misused as a way to polish up a company’s image, Purpose is bandied around as the solution to everything from lack of trust in corporations to avoiding the hard truths of business.

The idea that businesses have a wider duty than to generate returns is nothing new. Quaker founded businesses such as Cadbury and Rowntree were thinking about their workers as well as the bottom line back in the 19^th century. That thinking wasn’t limited to Quakers. In India, Jamsetji Tata helped not only to build India’s industrial base but its culture of corporate philanthropy too.

The current trend towards having a purpose began with brand consultants talking about companies having a noble or higher purpose. The idea being that you work on something greater than yourself and, in doing so, you create a brilliant company (i.e. we don’t make cars, we help people see the world). For those developing brands, this was a great idea. Brand development is all about what a company is and how it goes about doing what it does.

Responding at the speed of emotion

But then purpose started to trickle into the hands of marketers and PRs. Conversations went from being about having a purpose to demonstrating purpose. Latching on to the vogue-ish idea that emotion sells, purpose was used to anthropomorphise corporations. All of a sudden companies cared deeply about you, wanted to know you and wanted you to love them.

The touchy-feely stuff is great but it ignores two fundamentals of business. The first is that businesses cannot respond at the speed of emotion. It’s all well and good being loved, but when it turns out you’re ripping down forests or involved in sweatshops or underpaying staff, you can’t fix that problem faster than people will stop loving you. Relationships require an instant response and most businesses aren’t set up to deliver that.

Purpose before profit?

The second problem is that the markets don’t buy emotion. Unilever, the standard bearer for a new way to do business, learned this lesson the hard way. When Kraft Heinz came in with an offer to buy the firm, management had to offer shareholders a lot of concessions to avoid being sold, including greater cost cutting and a sharper focus on profitability. The brutal truth is that whatever your purpose, you still need to make money.

Simon Sinek and other modish TED talkers will glibly tell you to, “start with why.” But that advice is delivered out of context. Because along with your why, are other whys. Your investors’ why might be to get a good return on their investment. Your customers’ why might be because you’re the cheapest or most efficient or coolest. You can’t run a company in a vacuum.

Google famously seeks to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible. A noble goal. Imagine how far it would have got if it didn’t make mountains of cash by dominating digital advertising. Too many people talk about putting purpose before profits, but by weird coincidence most of the companies used as examples of purpose make a healthy profit and have been doing so for quite some time.

And there’s the rub. Corporations are like wealthy city-dwellers going to minimalist retreats, singing kumbaya and being mindful, all the while ignoring the inconvenient fact that their expensive spiritual weekend was paid for by selling things for money.

So beware the snake oil salesmen with their kumbaya capitalism. True purpose must run through every fibre of your firm. It should inform what you do and how you do it. Those decisions are made in the boardroom, not the PR department.