PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MARKETING 3.0
The Evolution Of Marketing And The New Professional Firm Business Model
I’ve gone and written another book. Professional Services Marketing 3.0.
People who know my writing will be shocked that I, who have vocally abhorred gimmicks and clichés, are using 3.0, but it really is the best way to describe the content of this new book. And it really is the most convenient way to make my point that there is a new paradigm in professional services marketing, and how it is changing the nature of professional firm practice.
Professional services marketing as we know it today began with the U.S. Supreme Court 1977 decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, which struck down the canons and codes of ethics that hithertofore prohibited lawyers and accountants from any outright marketing activities. That was professional services marketing 1.0. What it did was introduce the concept of frank competition.
It took about five years for the professions to grasp that fact and to begin learning how to market law and accounting firms. That began a period I call 2.0. We are still in it, but with one foot on a new era – professional services marketing 3.0. The book is about its evolution, and how the ability and need to compete has begun to reshape the nature of the professions, and to create a wave of law and accounting firm innovation that is now accelerating. Today’s law and accounting firms barely resemble the firms of the first three quarters of the 20th century.
During the early days following Bates, lawyers and accountants looked askance at marketing and marketers. There existed a barrier between the two groups that at first, inhibited effective and innovate marketing. As the practice of marketing began to evolve, and the professionals began to learn to compete using the tools of marketing, that barrier has begun to erode. But in the interim, the nature of the firms began to change to better compete, and now continues to do so. Most significantly, the nature of practice shifted focus from the value of professional services to the firm, to the value of those services to the client.
Bates was in 1977. In the 1980s, technology entered the picture, rapidly accelerating the changes we now see in professional firms, such as new forms of governance, new concepts of value to clients of legal and accounting services, outsourcing, new relationships between partners and non-partners, the increasingly mobile firm, and value billing.
At the same time, there’s new appreciation and understanding by professionals of marketing and marketers, and an increasing participation in the marketing process by the professionals.
This is an evolutionary process that continues into the foreseeable future, and is thoroughly described in the book – including the anatomy of change.
The book’s objective is not only to explain the process leading to Professional Service Marketing 3.0, but how to move comfortably into it, and how to thrive in it.
Much of the material is new, and much of it includes selected reprints of relevant articles from The Marcus Letter and other of my writing.
Professional Services Marketing 3.0 is a guide to the future, how to anticipate it as best as humanly possible, and how to be a part of it.
For information, click here http://bit.ly/MarcusBook.