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- P r o f e s s i o n a l _ D e v e l o p m e n t -
By Al Ries
Management, Marketing and Sales Consultants said the calling card I picked up recently in an airport lounge. The company, which I shall call "Smith Consulting Group," was unknown to me.
Not that I expected to know them. My experience has been that the more areas of expertise a consultant covers, the less successful the consultant. Big successful consultants are usually specialists like Philip Crosby (quality), Michael Hammer (reengineering) and Michael Porter (strategy).
Logic suggests otherwise. Why restrict your business to one specialty when you have the expertise to help clients in many different areas? Furthermore, a given project might need the integration that only a consultant skilled in many areas can provide.
Sounds logical. For years I thought the same way. Which is why the agency I ran did "advertising, marketing and public relations." As time went on, we narrowed the focus, first to "advertising and marketing," and then to "marketing strategy" only.
As illogical as it may seem, the more we narrowed our focus, the more financially successful we became. Some of our focusing moves were very painful. I remember the day we decided to shut down the advertising half of our business, giving up half of our income. It was a dark day indeed. What made this decision so difficult is that it made sense to do both marketing strategy and advertising. How could a client take full advantage of our marketing strategy unless it was integrated into their advertising?
Yet when we shut down the advertising to focus on marketing strategy, our business took off like a rocket.
Wherever you look today, the power belongs to the company with the narrower focus. Department stores are dying, but specialty stores like Toys "R" Us are booming.
Emery Air Freight was in the air cargo business. Anything you want to send by air, Emery could handle. Small packages, large packages, overnight rush deliveries, two- or three-day economy deliveries. Then Federal Express introduced one type of service ... small packages overnight. Today Federal Express is a much bigger company than Emery. As a matter of fact, Mr. Emery was fired.
Mail order catalogs are enormously successful today. But the granddaddy of all catalogs, the one book that contained everything you could possibly want to buy, recently was shut down because it had lost $450 million in three years. The specialists are in, the generalists like the Sears, Roebuck catalog are out. (With six partners, Sears is rolling out 14 specialized catalogs with seven more in test.)
- Sears is refocusing with a vengeance. It recently announced plans to spin off Allstate, Dean Witter and Colwell Banker. Many other companies are doing the same thing:
- Eastman Kodak is selling Sterling Winthrop (Bayer aspirin) to "focus on its core film operations."
- Mead put its Lexis/Nexis division on the block to "beef up its old-line businesses."
- James River decided to shed its office-paper business and "concentrate on its core consumer-paper business."
- Quaker Oats is folding its in-house promotions, package design and media services divisions to "better focus resources on building key brands."
And so it goes. Focusing is becoming the hot new management concept of the nineties. If you are a consultant or a consultant-to-be, you don't want to miss this particular boat.
Al Ries, Chairman of Ries & Ries, is a marketing strategy guru and the co-author, with Jack Trout, of several best-selling marketing books: "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Violate Them at Your Own Risk!, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, and Bottom-Up Marketing." He can be reached at 516-829-9191, FAX: 516-829-1587.