Are agencies and consultancies converging?
This idea was recently brought to life after reading about Deloitte’s purchase of Mobiento and McKinsey’s of Lunar Design. Thus following the foot steps of Accenture with their purchase of Fjord.
Is this marriage of industries perhaps a signal that the two are converging?
In this post I’ll share some experiences that led me to believe that Yes, they are converging, and have been so for a while.
When I was an engineering student six years ago, I was looking for an opportunity to apply my new-found knowledge on real-world problems. So during my second year I joined a student consultancy. While working there I got involved in numerous web development projects and early on noticed that our deliveries were not as refined designwise, as I thought they ought to be. This was because, at the time, we did not sell design. I cannot even recall design ever being on the table. Why was that? I believe a significant reason was that the staff had a different focus. We were engineering students, not design students. Despite that I was convinced that design would be valuable to integrate into our work. To introduce the organization to design and branding, I became the Marketing Director. As an MD I hired two branding and design specialists to introduce us to the importance of branding and design. This became the starting point of a re-design of our own website, with more time and focus set aside for design.
When reflecting back on this now, I believe the real issue was that design problems were less revered than engineering problems—thus de-prioritized. With these experiences in mind, I wonder how the relationship between consultancies and design looks today. Because as of now I believe that consultancies would benefit from expanding their business into design—And I cannot help but see a correlation there with regard to the acquirings mentioned earlier by Deloitte, McKinsey and Accenture—because by doing so they gain the opportunity to not only streamline an organization in a way that enables good design, they get to deliver it.
But how are agencies converging?
While working on a service design project two years ago I experienced first hand that good design does not always win, because even though our ideas were received well, the underlying organization had conflicting interests that crippled our solution conceptually and delayed it many months—only to eventually halt it altogether. The problems we faced were on a management level, typically something that a conventional consultancy would deal with. Internally we recognized that if we were to deliver good design, we would need to solve those problems first. Instead of letting another firm tackle those problems, we introduced the possibility of helping them with that as well. This allowed us to work with them strategically in an way that we previously could not. That in its turn helped us define a digital strategy that enables good design.
But how could we do this? By being a so called full–service agency. We had the staff with the necessary experience to resolve those organizational knots. When looking back, I realize that that project showed me the value and opportunities that a full–service offering creates.
So how does a full–service agency differ from a consultancy.. once they have converged? Well I can only speculate, but I have this idea that it could be as simple as this: Defining one self as an agency is an implicit way of saying »we can consult you, and we treat it like a design problem«. Whereas a consultancy would define themselves by a different approach.
Working with the entire problem has an apparent appeal.
To conclude this rant I wanna say that there seem to be an apparent appeal in working with the entire problem (no shock there…), rather than a symptom of it. That is why full–service agencies exist, and that is why consultancies purchase design agencies. They all want the entire cake, because inherently it gives them an opportunity to, hopefully, understand the problem better and create better solutions.
So my answer to the title question is, again, Yes, they are converging. Both have discovered the synnergy in dealing with and solving management, strategy and design problems together.
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