2. The Managing Partner of The Brandfair Partnership (TBP) describes her business: ‘It is about four years now since we specialised in the small-to-medium firms’ market. Before that we also used to provide brand consultancy services for anyone who walked in the door. So now we have built up our brand consultancy skills in many areas. However, within the firm, I think we could focus our activities even more. There seem to be two types of assignment that we are given. About 40 per cent of our work is relatively routine. Typically, these assignments are conventional market research and focus group exercises. Both these activities involve a standard set of steps that can be carried out by comparatively junior staff. Of course, an experienced consultant is needed to make some decisions; however, most of this work is fairly straightforward. Customers expect us to be relatively inexpensive and fast in delivering the service. They do not expect us to make simple errors; in fact if we did this too often we would lose business. Fortunately, our customers know that they are buying a

“standard package” and don’t expect it to be too customised. The problem here is that specialist agencies have been emerging over the last few years and they are starting to undercut us on price. Yet, I still feel that we can operate profitably in this market and anyway, we still need these capabilities to serve our other clients. The other 60 per cent of our work is for clients who require far more specialist services, such as assignments involving major brand reshaping. These assignments are complex, large, take longer, and require significant branding skill and judgement. It is vital that clients respect and trust the advice we give them in all “brand associated” areas such as product development, promotion, pricing, and so on. Of course, they assume that we will not be slow or unreliable in preparing advice, but mainly it’s trust in our judgement backed up by hard statistics that is important to the client. This is popular work with our staff. It is both interesting and very profitable.’ How different are the two types of business described by the Managing Partner of TBP? It has been proposed that she split the firm into two separate businesses; one to deal with routine services and the other to deal with more complex services. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?