Listen Up: How consulting firms are listening to the market and whether it helps
Talk to anyone about the listening activities that happen within their firm and you’re likely to be taken on a white-knuckle ride through the firm’s organisation, at the end of which you realise that all your energy has gone into decoding acronyms and understanding the relationship between various functions you’ve never heard of before, and that you’ve left no time to ask any more questions about the research itself.
That may be OK: Provided everyone within the firm understands how everything works, it doesn’t matter if it all sounds a bit confusing to someone external. It’s just that you end up with a nagging feeling that they don’t; that there’s as much head-scratching going on inside as there is outside; and that complexity is making it virtually impossible to join everything together. And that’s a problem because, according to our research, coordination is the key to unlocking value in listening activities.