MARKETING AS AN ADDRESS IN SPACE

A Fresh View of Professional Services Marketing

              The overwhelming body of knowledge about marketing seems to reside in two areas – the techniques, or tools (articles, press releases, collateral material, etc.), and the study of the markets themselves (such as the demographics, motivation for buying, etc. ).  Strategy -- the way in which the two are brought together -- is significant, and seems to work when the focus is on the nature of the markets, which are then addressed by the tools. Too much of marketing – all marketing – seems to reside in the tools. Certainly, in the view of the non-professional marketer, marketing is perceived primarily in the tools, and not in the strategy. For the well-trained and experienced professional marketer, however, the starting point is on the needs of the marketplace (and opportunities as well, of course). The product itself is secondary – as Peter Drucker points out, the role of the company is not to make products, but to make customers.

             In manufacturing, this basic underlying theory of marketing functions best. The focus is on the customer first, and then on the product that meets the customer’s needs or desires – or what the customer can be persuaded that he or she needs.

            But professional services offers a different environment, defined both in the nature of the professional service and in the way that service is delivered. Moreover, generations of tradition in the professions have shifted the focus from the customer – the client -- to the professional, in large measure for artificial – if sustaining – reasons. Rarely can a consumer of professional services be persuaded of the need for a professional until the need for a professional’s services emerge. One is sued. An audit is demanded of a company by either the government or a source of finance. One needs a contract to seal an agreement.

            And so the differences between a service and a product become both apparent and significant. If I sell you a product, the product stays, and I go. There may be a thousand people behind the manufacture of a tube of toothpaste, but the interface between the manufacturer and the consumer is the tube of toothpaste. The interface between a lawyer or an accountant and the client is the lawyer or accountant responsible for performing the service.  The next tube of your brand of toothpaste you buy will reliably be the same as the last tube you bought, but will the next lawsuit you bring or defend buy the same as the last? Will, the next tax return you do be the same as the last? Not readily.

            There is, then, an additional element in professional services marketing – one that either doesn’t exist in product marketing, or exists as secondary to other factors. It is a different form of relationship. That form of relationship is best illustrated by an old theory of mine – the address in space. It goes like this…

            You tell me you live at 26 Smith Street, at the intersection of Smith and Dale. Those are old streets, and the intersection has been there a long time, since the roads were first laid out and named. And unless your town is bulldozed at that section, your address at that intersection will be there beyond your lifetime.

            But in space bodies are always in motion, always moving, always changing, always shifting. There is no constant or fixed position. The address of any body in space, then, is always in relation to other moving bodies, which themselves are always moving or shifting. You can’t know, then, precisely where a body exists, except in relation to other bodies.

            And this, then, is the element that drives the singular nature of marketing professional services – the constantly changing relationship between the professional and the client. It is tempered not by a manufacturing process, but by changing personalities, changing circumstances, changing laws and regulations beyond the control of either professionals or clients, the infusion of new and different economic or social elements. It is further complicated by the fact that in today’s dynamic economy, where all commerce is affected by new technology, new interplays, new relationships and new intercultural demands, the relationship between the client and the professional is rarely the same, from one day to the next. Nor are tomorrow’s demands of the professional likely to be satisfied by yesterday’s solutions.

            This new relationship between professional and client is further complicated by the changing nature of the professions themselves, in which two phenomena are redefining the nature of the professions.

            One is the erosion of barriers between professions – where does the role of the accountant end and the role of the lawyer begin? Once an easy definition, cast by tradition and controlled and tempered by so called canons of ethics, but now changing rapidly. Law firms are now, in some quarters, owned by accounting firms, and some accounting functions are being performed by law firms. And not just accounting functions – financial functions as well. The rapidly emerging internet and e-commerce industry is generating a new financing and management role for law firms, well beyond bewigged tradition and classical chambers.

            The second is the addition, circa 1977 (the Bates decision), of the new element of frank competition. Professional firms can now compete against one another in ways that had not been possible before 1977. But this poses another problem. One can say “We make better bread,” but can one say “We do better audits,” or “We write better briefs?”  Of course not. And not just for the residual canons of ethics , but rather for credibility. How do you prove it? How do you even say it believably? Furthermore, unlike most industries, there is no marketing tradition in the professions. The concept of competition comes to us like an alien from another planet.

            These factors, then, add up to the reality that if accountants and lawyers are to compete successfully in today’s marketplace – if they are to function successfully in the changing arena of professional services, there must be a shift in emphasis from the tenets of the old marketing to the realities of the new. They must accept the significance of relationships as an element of marketing that makes marketing professional services different from marketing products.

            How does this translate into practice? What must be done to the strategic plan to assure the professional firm survival in the coming decades?

            It starts  not with a radical redesign of the traditional firm – that will come of itself – but with assessment that springs from the old and goes to the new. It will not be imposed – it will emerge. For example…

• All marketing, old and new, begins with the market itself. It begins to dawn on today’s professional that the heart of the practice is not the lawyer or accountant, but the client. Gone is the Melancholy Baby Syndrome – the piano player who’ll play anything you want to hear so long as it’s Melancholy Baby. Gone is the day of the  lawyer or accountant who tells, but doesn’t listen. This is a very difficult concept to grasp, after generations of tradition and training and the intellectual perks and prestige of being a professional. Today and tomorrow, a professional is not an existential entity – he or she is only as he or she does.

This is further exacerbated by recognizing that a view of the marketplace may begin with history, but must end in the future. Not where the market has been in the demand and need for services, but where it is going to be tomorrow. There are new rhythms in the marketplace, and the professional must be prepared to hear them, and then dance to them.

• The professional – the lawyer or the accountant – must reassess his or her own ability to shift the focus of thinking from the past to the future. There must be a willingness to free oneself from the shackles of the past. While the body of law, or the principles of accounting, remain the bulwarks of the segments of society they govern, they are, first of all, not entirely inflexible, nor are their uses and devices immune from innovative use. It is this very flexibility that is making possible the figurative osmosis on both sides of the membrane that separates law and accounting. The answer, then, is not to fight it, but to find ways to use it.

The sticking factor here is the need that both commerce and society continue to have for the objectivity, the independence, the probity of the professional. But change need not put these factors in jeopardy. Rather, the professions can readily find ways to innovate without losing these important virtues.  The professional must shift from an imperious figure, wearing his or her profession like a badge of office, to one that serves the economy and the law in behalf of the client.

What must also be re-examined is the structure of the professional firm itself. No longer is the traditional hierarchical structure of the professional firm adequate to the needs of the contemporary marketplace. The range of management skills needed to run the contemporary firm have outgrown traditional structures. The partnership structure tends not to make the best uses of management skills, and impedes the pace at which management decisions must be made. The practice group structure, with certain safeguards built in, seem a likely structural path for the near term, but may not be adequate in the long term, as economic changes compound.

• The professional firm must now be recognized for what it is – a structure to deal with the market it serves. It must recognize that it no longer exists for itself, but as an instrument to get and sustain clients. Lawyering or accounting are merely the services provided to fill the channels opened by the devices of marketing. A full and comfortable room in the house must be opened for the professional marketer. At the same time, the professional marketer must know more than traditional marketing, if he or she is to adequately serve the professional. The marketer must understand the lawyer or the accountant, and in ways that surpass the traditional understanding of product.
• It is astonishing that every lawyer, and every accountant,  knows that livelihood and career growth depend upon the ability to deliver and keep clients. And yet, as we approach the millennium, there is virtually no law school or accounting school that recognizes that there are skills the professional must know to survive. But sink or swim is no longer a viable preparation for any professional. The elitism of professionals festers at professionals’ schools, and must be routed out, if the professional is to thrive in the coming decades.
• Continuing professional education is no longer a service to the professions alone –it is an obligation to those served by professionals. Nor should it be limited to only the skills of the profession. There is too much to be known about commerce and industry and the needs of clients in a dynamic economy. There are too many skills that professionals need to know that they don’t know.
• The management skills needed to run a professional firm are a different set of skills than those that are needed to merely sit at the head of a firm. A professional firm is a business. A professional firm that competes is a marketing entity. There are new problems in motivation, in hierarchical structuring, in strategic planning, in human resources management, in client relationships, and in relationships to a new market. The demands of this new kind of management bring the skills of management to a new realm of artfulness – one for which the traditional lawyer or accountant is rarely trained.
• And the ultimate lesson to be learned is that the catalytic element of tomorrow’s professional services marketing is that the relationship that begins with the market – the client – now includes the professional. As one moves and changes, so too must the other.

The tools of marketing are, of themselves, immutable. Except perhaps for the use of the internet, nothing much has changed in generations. We still have networking, and public relations and speeches and seminars and articles. We still understand the need for fathoming the markets we serve, and the strategy for using the tools to reach that market. But the difficult lesson to learn is that the value of the tools is not in themselves, but in how innovatively, persuasively, imaginatively they are used.

But it is only when we understand the changing relationships between the professional and the client, and the need to nurture ones ability to function in that relationship with flexibility and agility, that the professions will be able to adapt and survive the coming generations.

HOME