CAN THE FARMER AND THE COWBOY STILL BE FRIENDS?
The Marketing Culture And The Professional Practice
You’d think we’d all have gotten the message by now. We’re different. But the differences between marketers and the professionals they serve should supply the dynamic tension that makes the system work, because dynamic tension forces progress, and, properly directed, gives relevance to the principles of all involved.
In the early, post-Bates days, when marketing was new to professional services, it was a marriage of cultures as different as Eskimo and Empire. The marketers didn’t understand the professional and the professionals viewed marketing as an uncouth sort of thing done by some people down the hall. Marketers, entering accounting and law firm environs for the first time, didn’t have the least inkling of what the lawyers and accountants were talking about, and the professionals saw marketing through the haze of myth.
Public relations? That’s free advertising, isn’t it? Why are we advertising in Fortune? I never read Fortune. If my mother wanted me to be a salesman she would have sent me to selling school. Any of us who lived through those days still smart of the memory of it. We found that for the non-lawyer in a law firm, and for the non-accountant in an accounting firm, there was no hospitality.
This attitude was engendered by the professional’s notion that the LBA or the CPA bestowed instant wisdom, like the Wizard of Oz awarding a brain or courage. This attitude was almost understandable. After all, the professions exist because the clients are people with problems they can’t solve themselves, and who come on bended knee to the professional, who solves and soothes.
Gradually, that attitude has changed, driven not by the professional, but by two things – the demands of the client, and competition. After all, what Bates really said was that now I can go after your clients and you can go after mine. Competition. But competition was not within the experience of the professional. It required different and unfamiliar skills. The marketer, to succeed, had to be more aggressive than was in the experience of the professional. The conservatism of the professional was frustrating, and difficult for the marketer to understand. And thus, the clash.
But where the dialectic of the opposing cultures works to produce a marketing culture that respects both cultures and both points of view, marketing succeeds. The need to coexist becomes urgent, as competition becomes keener, and the expertise and professionalism of the marketer becomes clear.
It works this way. I was representing Goldman, Sachs as a marketing consultant during the Penn Central scandal. At stake was the future of the commercial paper market, because Goldman, Sachs had sold most of the Penn Central commercial paper. In a meeting with the client and their very prestigious law firm, everything I proposed was shot down by the old-school lawyers. Finally, in exasperation, I said to the lawyer, “You know, I understand that your job is to see that nothing we say comes up in court to hit our client in the back of the neck. My job is to keep the client viable in the marketplace. I’ll tell you what --- I’ll respect what you must do, if you respect what I must do.” The crusty old senior partner of the law firm fixed his eagle-eyed gaze on me, and after a long searing gaze, said, “Done.” It was fine after that.
We live in an era, now, where marketing is as integral a part of a professional practice as managing a firm’s cash. We live in an era in which it’s the client, not the profession or the practice itself, that’s at the core of a successful practice. To professions not steeped in a tradition of marketing, this can be a hard fact to accept, and requires an attitude not easy to learn. But accept and learn it the professions must do. No option. Your competitor has already learned it. If you don’t, you lose.