THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
Academia, Anachronism, And
Distortion In Marketing Literature
MARKETING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES, by Philip Kotler, Thomas Hayes, and Paul N. Bloom. Second edition. Prentice Hall, Paramus N.J. 422 pages.
The difficulty I face in writing this review is that the authors acknowledge “the ideas offered by…Bruce Marcus” – and I must disavow any contribution they perceive I may have made. This disclaimer is necessary because I think this book so substantially misunderstands its subject as to be virtually useless to any professional, or professional marketer, and I don’t want my name associated with it. I find few ideas in the book that are consistent with my experience or knowledge, which go back a very long way to well before the Bates decision.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but the damage the authors do to any realistic view of marketing professional services warrant a dim view of their treatment of the subject. One of the authors and I had two brief conversations regarding their using my article Ten Myths That Impede Professional Services Marketing, in which I agreed reluctantly. Reluctantly, because I don’t think Professor Kotler has shown any inkling of what professional services marketing is about. I was led to believe that the co-authors of the book did. They don’t.
It is an academic’s book, and sees the subject in such distorted ways as to remind me of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. His concept of life included such dicta as, “Are noses not so wonderfully made to fit spectacles?” The book is an anachronism that might have been written 25 years ago, before we had any real understanding and experience in marketing for lawyers and accountants. It attempts to fit the unique and complex characteristics of professional services into an antiquated mold of product marketing. And it is rife with mistakes. It draws false conclusions from shallow observations, from the rain makes worms school.
Philip Kotler, ostensibly the author (well, much of the content comes from earlier Kotler works) is an academic who is widely known for his textbooks on marketing. His name is on an earlier book on marketing professional services that was so absent of any knowledge of the subject as to be ludicrous. The two academic co-authors of this edition apparently tried to take some of his earlier concepts, developed for product marketing many years ago, and force these ideas into a professional services mold. They fit like a size 10 foot into a size 5 shoe.
On top of which the book is carelessly edited. For example, on page 407, the statement “…the oft-cited case of Bates vs. Arizona, which gave physicians the right to advertise.” Good Lord. Bates vs. State Bar of Arizona (1977) was the landmark decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Canons of Ethics that prohibited lawyers from advertising, and by extension, frank marketing. It then took ten or more years, and a lot of attrition, for other professionals to grasp its true meaning -- that they were able to compete -- and then to wear down the numerous state bar and legislative prohibitions against marketing for all professions. Bates was the guiding decision that generated the concept, new to professionals, of competition. (And – another careless mistake -- the name of this online publication, by the way, is The Marcus Letter, not The Marcus Newsletter.)
There are many similar bits of editorial carelessness, but the real problem with the book is its failure to understand the true nature, problems, and solutions, of professional services marketing. The book uses antique and useless concepts that are no longer valuable or relevant (if ever they were). For example, in trying to explain how service marketing differs from product marketing, they talk about such outmoded and arcane concepts as service intangibility, which has long been shown to be irrelevant, and perishability, which may have currency to an academic, but not to a working marketer. It tries to impose Kotler’s old concept of the four p’s (product, promotion, place, and price) on professional services, which has never fit and doesn’t now. The authors talk of quality, another old academic saw, citing concepts that are important in manufacturing and in some nonprofessional services. Quality as a marketing tool for professionals is irrelevant. Quality should be a given for professionals, both by the definition of the practice and by what the law dictates for professional performance. The book’s views of these and other differences in professional services have the depth of understanding that might be found in a college freshman’s view of a complex and sophisticated world.
The authors’ view of marketing itself is particularly disturbing. In a world in which competition has forced a virtual reconstruction of the professions, to speak of marketing as if it were some cosmetic product that you might like to try is a distortion of reality. Even their definition of marketing is academically strained, and is a quote from an earlier Kotler book, too obtuse to repeat here. The book then goes on to oversimplify complex ideas, and to distort others. Of niche marketing, they say, “A niche…is a more narrowly defined group whose needs are not being well served.” Oh? Any working professional service marketer today knows that a niche is a market segment -- it can be a commercial category (say, the insurance industry) or a group with a common need for a particular kind of service (say, computer auditing for a broad spectrum of companies) – that can be targeted for a specific marketing campaign based on the professional’s expertise and experience with that industry or service. A niche, like any defined audience, must also be accessible by some kind of marketing device.
Other concepts, such as positioning, are completely distorted. Positioning is one of the most important concepts in professional services marketing today. It takes as its starting point the most specific and urgent need of a market, and demonstrates how a firm understands and can meet that need. One cannot arbitrarily impose a position on a market, simply because the service offered is in the inventory.
Other inaccuracies abound. They speak of fee splitting without realizing that it’s one of the prime prohibitions of the professions. They seem not to understand the differences between specialties in law and accounting firms. Most significantly, they consistently assume that professional services can be sold like products. (I once appeared on a panel with an advertising executive who made the same assumption. I asked him, “If professional services can be sold like products, does that mean that if I were a matrimonial attorney, and did a marvelous job of marketing, I could persuade you, a happily married man, to get a divorce?”) Marketing, they say, is no longer the job of the marketing department. Anybody who has spent an hour in a law or accounting firm knows that it never was. You may be able to market a car without involving the vice president of manufacturing, but try marketing a law or accounting firm without involving a lawyer or accountant.
These crucial points are at the very core of professional firm practice and management, and therefore, professional services marketing. Ultimately the book’s failure to realize the vast and complex differences between marketing a product and marketing a professional service -- a process that is both relatively new and distinctive – is its most serious shortcoming. The authors, in attempting to translate tired principles of product marketing into professional services marketing, are clueless and artless.
These are just a few problems with this book. There are many more. The real problem is that with Kotler’s name on the book, it will undoubtedly be used as a textbook, in which people who have never done it will teach professional services marketing to students who don’t know better.
In the early days of marketing professional services, just after Bates, there was a great deal of groping to find out how to make it work. There is a substantial body of literature, including the articles on this site, The Marcus Letter, that chronicles what we’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t. (Oddly, there’s no bibliography in the book). See also the review, on this site, of Inside Outside, How business Buy Legal Service, by the knowledgeable and estimable Larry Smith. It would seem that the authors either haven’t read the literature or don’t understand it. Nor do they have, I strongly suspect, an intensive experience in building any professional practice The ideas they write about are so distorted as to be out of sync. This is marketing as seen prismatically through a piece of distorting glass.
But who knows? Maybe Dr. Pangloss was right.