This article was published on Top-Consultant.com on the 23rd August, 2006. The interview with Diametric Consulting founder and chief executive, Robert Diamond, discusses marketing as a strand of management consulting and explores its challenges, diversity and rewards. As written by Mick James.

Marketing - could this be the most interesting strand of consulting there is?

Marketing has always intrigued me as a consultancy area. On the one hand, the marketing director is simply another manager who may or may not need management consultancy advice. On the other, marketing managers face their own universe of professional advisers in the form of PR, marketing and advertising agencies. And many of the business areas that marketing is deeply involved with are crucial to the highest level of business strategy.

So we have an area where agencies, business consultants and strategy houses intersect, yet often appear to operate in parallel universes, speaking different languages and operating according to their own disciplines.

For Robert Diamond, founder and chief executive of Diametric Consulting, that point of intersection is the "sweet spot" where his consultancy has positioned itself.

"We see the levers of growth as brand, consumers and channel," he says. "If you operate at that level, you can step down into the specifics of any of them. But if you work in, say an advertising agency, its not so easy to step up that ladder."

For Diamond, creating a consultancy that can talk about these issues at a holistic, business level is the only way to address the problems of an increasingly hard-pressed and undervalued individual - the marketing manager.

Diamond sees marketing managers as increasingly stuck between a rock and a hard place. Marketing budgets are usually set on a "business as usual" basis, yet the problems they are asked to solve are often far from day-to-day.

"They are not resourced against those very complex challenges of how to achieve growth in the business," says Diamond. "At the same time the marketing consultancy community they face is highly fragmented. If I need to answer a business problem - I'm not selling enough stuff - where do I go? There are so many potential partners."

The problem is that each partner will see whatever their discipline is as the answer: "an advertising agency will say you need an ad campaign, but a business has a lot of moving parts," says Diamond.

Worse, this can sometimes be accompanied by a lack of respect for the all round professionalism of the marketing manager.

"We never underestimate the marketing manager - these people do this as their day job," he says. "You must never think you know more than them. Their challenge is that they don't have the resources or the bandwidth to think about the systematic structural problems that can change their business. We [see] ourselves as an extension of the marketing department - we can get them where they want to be faster."

Diametric's broad-based approach means that they encounter different competitors according to whether the project is biased towards brand, consumer or channel issues.

"Where we work best is where consumer behaviour is seen as the fundamental driver," says Diamond. "That is how we sew together consumer, brand and channel. We do get that with our biggest clients, but that's a case of cause and effect - it's what makes them our biggest clients and gives us the biggest impact."

Delivering this approach means that Diametric seeks individuals with both broad experience and a substantial brand hinterland:

"There are three or four things we look for," says Diamond. "We want people who are very academically strong, and we want people with specific skills in brand, channel management and consumer analytics. We walso want people with very strong and relevant experience, a healthy dollop of which should be on the client side."

As a result, recruits tend to come from backgrounds with such major commerical names as Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Kraft and Johnson & Johnson.

The main criteria, though, is what Diamond calls "commerical curiosity".

"We ask people: would you like to hold three or four marketing managers' jobs in a week," he says. "Some say, yes that would be very stimulating, others say no. We don't take the view that good business people become consultants and bad business people stay where they are, but we are fairly ruthless and we only hire the best."

As a result, hiring good people remains one of the main constraints on Diametric's growth.

"The deal breaker for us is personality fit," he says. "We have a very strong culture - it doesn't mean everyone is the same - but the clincher for us is that commerical curiosity."