How consultants write a good situation appraisal and real objectives for a marketing consultation proposal

It is necessary for consultants to build a relationship with their buyers, or in other words, the customer paying for their services. Once you have established a relationship, you can follow up with a meeting to establish their insights in further details and further define a conceptual agreement or proposal of some sort. In other words, the value of your future work helps to determine our own fees as consultants. The basic elements of this proposal are:



The situation appraisal is a description of the client needs. As a marketing consultant, it is important that you find the underlying causes of issues of the business, rather than tackle their effects. Companies easily confuse the two together, resulting in alternative or arbitrary objectives. Consequently, some consultants propose the wrong solutions for their client needs because they do not understand the real problem, and this consequently results in leaving the clients unsatisfied.

Allow me to illustrate this with few marketing examples:

Note. Adapted from Marketing research- Author- Zikmund W, Ward S, Lowe B, Hume Winzar H, Babin B. 2014. South Melbourne

As illustrated above, the effects and causes can be often be confused with one another. It is therefore up to the consultant to take their time in understanding the real issues and thus identifying the most appropriate solutions.  One technique often utilised to aid with this, is to ask and answer specific questions including:

These questions will provide you with a deeper insight into your client’s needs and their expectations. Another useful method that we can employ is a technique called “5 Whys” or “5 Times Why” (Uma Sekaran, 2016).

Let me illustrate this with an example: let imagine that we have a long-running local restaurant that has suddenly decided to decrease their sales.

If we would like to get a better understanding into this, we should question:

Why? - Because they don’t have any clear marketing strategies.

Why? - Because perhaps the manager does not address marketing aspect.

Why? - Because the manager is facing various management issues.

Why? - Because the restaurant does not have a big team including an integrated marketing team.

Why? - Because it is a small business and they don’t have the resources for it (time or money)

In this instance, we can clearly see that the root cause of the marketing issues is their lack of resources.

On the other hand, while the objectives are the desired business outcomes, they should be linked to the situational appraisal. Therefore, a marketing consultant is required to highlight the objectives that are required to improve the client’s condition. Once you define the real issue, it is important that the right language for the definition of the proper objectives is used. For example: Frequent and long delays may translate into much frustration among passengers in a specific airline. Hence, clients give negative reviews on social media and consequently affect the brand image (Uma Sekaran, 2016). Here are examples of deliverables or arbitrary options that are translated into outcomes or objectives:

Table 2 Alternative vs. Real Objective

In short, as consultant we have to ensure that we are providing the right situation appraisal in order to be convincing to our future buyer.  

References 

Uma Sekaran, R. B. (2016). Research methods for business. A skill building approach . Chichester : Wiley.

Weiss, A. (2016). Million dollar consulting . New york : McGraw hill .

William Zikmund, S. W. (2014). Marketing research . South Melbourne: Cengage learning .