Firstly, industrial customers are a narrow circle of customers. Secondly, industry has high supply volumes. In this case, logistics is greatly simplified if there are no intermediaries in the marketing channel. Thirdly, industrial distribution requires a high level of technical background of sale personal.

If an intermediary is present in the industrial sales channel, it differs greatly from the intermediate in other contexts. These industrial middlemen build stronger relationships with both the manufacturer and the consumer. Industrial intermediaries’ job is to modify the product to fit the consumer’s final objectives. Personal selling is the primary method used by the push approach to promote its products. Within the Push model, product customization is frequently done by an intermediary. The push method is more frequently used in commercial marketing.

The strategy, where he middleman actively participates is Push Strategy. Demand generation and supply are the duties of the intermediary. The second possible sales strategy is Pull Strategy. The manufacturer is primarily in charge of generating demand from end customers in this strategy. Direct sales to the ultimate consumer and advertising campaigns are used to generate demand.

To sum up, a Push Strategy means an intermediary is responsible for sales, and a Pool Strategy is when a company or brand has a direct impact on the end consumer. In general, It should be noted that industrial sales require the participation of a large number of employees, and most importantly managers.

Another feature of industrial marketing is low price elasticity. This means that price changes do not cause significant fluctuations in total demand. All this forms the concept that should be followed when forming the marketing mix. The marketing mix should match and reflect the brand’s market strategy.

by Dimerion Steelson,

ConselSenses

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Images

There are two main purposes pictures or images are mostly used in presentations:

• for creating an emotional background for the presentation when you need to create some feeling or emotion supporting the main topic (it is important to notice that nowadays the tendency is not to use background images on every page of a presentation);
• in a quite straightforward way to show something or someone whether it is a picture of a person or a picture of a production process or an idea.

It is okay to use photos and drawings from the internet. A picture representing a typical fact or concept can be taken from a Wikipedia page or some other popular website. For those images that create an emotion or some understanding the emotional understanding of the presentation, online libraries or repositories are usually extremely helpful. There are both paid subscription and free-to-use variants to surf through online.

Block charts and schemes

Block charts or schemes are the central part of strategic consulting presentations design. They carry the most weight in designing strategic processes and explaining the concepts normally discussed at strategic meetings. Examples of these include organizational charts, process flow charts, process creation charts, etc. Mostly, these are not created from scratch. Usually, block charts are created using some templates. There are a few online libraries that have templates for professional-looking block schemes and process charts.

Charts and graphs

Charts are mostly graphs and other representations of the data. There are many ways on how to use charts in your presentation. Normally, they are employed to provide a more analytical and at the same time easier to grasp view of the data. Instead of complex tables or intricate rows of data a tendency or some important point can be drawn on a chart.

Icons

Icons are intended to make your presentations look more lively. It has become quite an important part of the presentation design recently. In many cases icons also make a presentation look much more professional. There are many online icon libraries to find a suitable variant for each of your ideas. Usually, icons are used in several ways:

• instead of bullet signs in the bullet points in lists with each icon related to the text next to it;
• to depict some key concepts in a short and, at the same time, understandable way (basically employing the ideas that were laid in hieroglyphics);
• trademarks or trade icons are used to represent companies (these can normally be found on the companies’ websites in several graphical formats that can be most efficiently used in your presentation – just go to the company’s website and find the type you need).

Color palettes

An important part of any chart design is a color palette. Palettes distinguish the corporate style as well as a professionally-looking design. The main aspects of palettes include matching colors, outlining key ideas, and highlighting critical elements. Besides the default palettes available as a part of virtually every software there are many examples that can be found on the internet.

In conclusion, these are the most important graphical elements of presentations used in strategic consulting. Most of them are used extensively in any presentation. However, there is an appropriate use for all of them, so that the viewer is not overwhelmed with the ubiquity of the graphical design elements.

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Appropriate chart type

The choice of an appropriate chart is mostly a skill acquired with experience. Still, there are several useful hints for the correct chart choice:

• for time trends it is better to use line or bar charts;
• structure is best revealed on pie charts;
• showing both structure within the time trends is normally shown with stacked bar charts;
• dependencies are most meaningfully depicted with regression lines on scatter plots.

Stacking

It is important to meaningfully stack data. This helps the viewer to clearly understand what ideas the creator of the chart was implying or was leading the conclusion to. So, the crucial principle here is to compare equal with equal. Companies should be compared to companies, countries to other countries, etc.

Color palettes

Most modern software allows using many color palettes that meet the requirements of creating a contemporary-looking presentation. Nevertheless, the general advice is not to use extremely bright colors and to go with pastel colors. At the same time, it is equally important that all the details on the chart are seen patently. In this way, check if the chart details, lines, bars, and figures can be clearly seen both when shown via a PC and a projector.

Specifications

All the charts need to have available all the information to read and analyze. The axes need to be signed, the chart name should be present, the axes should have meaningful points, the legend should be on, etc.

This is especially vital for more complicated or complex charts, i.e. the ones you add any drawings on the chart showing some particular points and explaining them. Try to be succinct and to use less graphical detail.

Combinations

Combining several charts on one slide is not recommended. It can be used when the audience is aware of the topic or data analysis shown on the charts. If it is not the case, it is much more useful to use one chart per slide. In this way, the viewers can quickly get acquainted with the details and draw sensible conclusions from the chart.

To sum up, these are just a few tips on chart design. Indeed, there are much more ideas for creating a professional-looking presentation in strategic consulting. Nevertheless, these are the essential ones and every consultant or creator of the presentations should be using them.

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Presentations

The majority of presentations in consulting are for internal discussions. Consultants talk with presentations. At the same time, the final results are presented to the customers and clients. Accordingly, it is crucial that these presentations are efficient in explaining the main discussion points, but simultaneously the need to look immaculate in terms of the picture that a client looks at.

With presentations there are several points to pay attention to. Basically, everything should be done according to some standard. These standards are normally taught at consulting agencies or consulting companies: every consultant has been drilled for several years at how to create a proper presentation. Here are several points to pay attention to:

• overall tidiness including aligned visual blocks, distinct graphical patterns, commensurate colors;
• ability to use the best visual scheme or visual pattern for each slide to efficiently convey the slide idea or message;
• variety of the slide design means that sometimes you need to go with a chart, then a scheme, then a process graphical representation, then a table, etc.;
• the necessity to adhere to a custom color palette or proper application of the corporate colors and standards;
• extremely careful use of animations, bright pictures, videos, and other media.

Marketing materials

The second area where design is extensively used is marketing. No question that business strategy is in many times closely connected to and overlaps with strategic marketing. So, it’s crucial to have a better understanding of how marketing campaigns are designed and to what extent visual and graphical representation is important in marketing.

By no means strategic consultants should be top-level professionals in marketing design, but at the very least they should understand and be aware of the intricacies of marketing visual concepts and ways to represent products. There are several aspects of marketing design to look at:

• brand creation and design;
• marketing campaigns including ads, distributional materials, texts, etc.;
• the graphical design used in marketing campaigns.

Complex processes display

The third area where design is important is the actual visual description of the technological processes or complex ideas done within strategic consulting projects. Since it is the essence of consulting to present complex processes in a more understandable way the key idea here is to get rid of all the secondary processes and concentrate on the core. Going from top to bottom is normally the best way to design these processes.

In conclusion, these are the three key areas of design application in strategic consulting. Indeed, more needs for better design exist within the consulting environment but those are deemed less important.

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