Meaningfully Different

Sluggish Strategy Consultants

Typically, leading change and technology practices have the intellectual horsepower to explore the new commercial landscape, but have optimised their businesses in such a way that many of them have blinkered themselves. This means their traditional vertical 'silo' based thinking has been at the expense of more horizontal thinking, and valuable knowledge sharing across boundaries, which the web 2.0 world demands.

Some will say that marketers, agencies and others whose roles intersect with the connected consumer will fill this void. In practice, this is far from the truth. Marketers, designers and the agency world lack both the business rigour and corporate strategy competency. In this context, we bill ourselves very clearly as a new breed of advisory boutique that understands the subtleties of how technology and the Internet are changing the business landscape.

Beyond Marketing

The new reality is that ‘digital’ now reaches beyond the mere marketing function of firms – and penetrates further upstream into other core areas of many organisations. This so-called ‘customer oxygen' is not only the lifeblood of any firm; it's the validation of all that a firm extols in its marketing material. As a result, it is forcing leaders to stand up and take notice.

Outside agencies have a tendency to focus mostly on short-term brand concepts, not new platforms, formats and business ideas. What’s more, marketers speak and think in a different language than their colleagues in finance, sales, operations and the C-Suite. As such, the reality is that they often struggle to be taken seriously in the boardroom.

Firms therefore need support in talking the ‘right’ language. They need strategies; left-brain argumentations, numbers and facts, i.e., rational and analytical approaches that match the traditional way businesses operate.