RAIN MAKES WORMS
How Academics View Marketing
KELLOGG ON INTEGRATED MARKETING, Ed. By Dawn Iacobucci and Bobby Calder (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University) John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ, 2003. To order click here.
If you want to know, as a professional services marketer, how it feels to be invisible, read this book. Here, a group of professors from a leading school of marketing goes on for 314 pages with scarcely a reference to marketing a professional service. I do believe they don’t get it.
The result is an interesting book on how to market a product, which, as every professional services knows, is indeed different. I may persuade you to buy a candy bar when you hadn’t planned to. I may persuade you to choose my brand of candy bar over his brand. You know that the next candy bar you buy from your favorite brand is going to be the same as the last one. And when I sell you a candy bar, the candy bar stays, and I go.
When I sell you a professional service, I stay to perform that service. I may persuade you to use my firm rather than his firm, but nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “What I really need today is a good audit.” Or, “What a lovely day to sue somebody.” In product marketing the need for the product can conceivably be generated where that need didn’t exist before. Professional services, for both practical and ethical reasons (yes, there’s a difference) can’t do that.
In fact, one of the authors actually suggests that there’s not much purpose in denying a customer the right to buy your product (assuming there’s nothing dangerous or illegal involved). A sale is a sale, and a product doesn’t care who owns it. A lawyer or accountant is very much involved with the clients chosen or denied, and for good reasons. Compared to product marketers, we live in a lonely world.
Is there a value for the professional services marketer, then, in this book? Yes and no. Yes, because it’s comprehensive enough so that, read selectively and very carefully, there are some marketing theories that can perhaps inform – perhaps inspire – any marketer. For example, the last chapter, by Professor Stephen Burnett, called Reflections On Becoming A Great Marketing Organization, is rational and useful for any marketer. Aspects of what they call integrated marketing, in which a marketing program uses several different marketing vehicles to address the marketing objective, are so relevant that we’ve been talking about it for years. What they trumpet as new, viral marketing, is something that every experienced professional services marketer has done for years, and particularly since the advent of the internet. Before that phrase came into fashion, we called it networking, and word of mouth.
And no, because so much of what they write about has absolutely no relevance to what we must do to serve our clients. While it’s tempting to use the devices that product marketing uses to make a sale, it’s not quite the same thing as creating a client. In fact, there’s an ambivalence in the book, in which the opening chapter downplays building a marketing program based on the needs of the customer, and the rest of the book which says quite the opposite.
While it’s popular to assume that academics know the answer to marketing – either a product or a service – they really don’t (with notable exceptions, of course). Academics take the whole and break it down into its parts, and then assume that the whole is the sum of its parts. Not so, in marketing. Ultimately, marketing is an art. It may use the tools of marketing, which are in themselves neither arcane nor difficult, but it’s not the tools that work, it’s the artfulness with which they’re used. This applies to assessing the market, to casting your firm in terms of the needs of the market, to choosing the tools to use to project your capabilities to the market, to managing the tools and the marketing effort.
This book, for the most part, is a backward glance at what marketers have done in the past, which is one way to teach marketing to beginners. It says very little about what to do tomorrow. There is remarkably little, for example, on what the computer and the Internet have done to classic marketing. It relies heavily on jargon and fad words. (Every trade has its jargon, but is there any other trade that relies so heavily on fad words like marketing does?) Whole fads can come and fade without making a dent in the realities of a subject. What can come after viral marketing that’s any better than what came before it? Integrated marketing isn’t a revelation, it’s a fact, with experience that proves its worth.
To the incipient product marketer, this book has something to say. To the professional services marketer, it’s a distraction from the reality of professional services marketing, in which marketers are held responsible for results, not theory.
An abbreviated version of this review appeared in the superior British publication, Professional Marketing – The worldwide journal for marketing professional services.