TURNING BASE METAL INTO GOLD
The Secret Ingredient That Makes Marketing Work
There is a mystery in marketing, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. No matter how good we are, no matter how intensive our efforts or how broad our skills and experience, there is always too much we don’t know.
We don’t know all we need to know about the market for our services, nor exactly why people buy. We don’t know as much as we think we do about how to inform and motivate our prospective clientele. We don’t know a great deal, although we think we do, about how to motivate professionals to participate in the marketing process.
We know that there is much more to learn about how to structure the contemporary law or accounting firm to meet the needs of the changing clientele. We know remarkably little about how to measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts in professional services, when professionals must rely on circumstances beyond their control to bring the client through the door rather than the efficacy of marketing efforts, nor do we know a great deal about how to distinguish one firm from another and project that distinction. In fact, we know very little about how to deal with change, and right now, there’s a great deal of it.
Too few professionals -- and marketers – understand the profound differences between marketing a product and marketing a professional service, and why that difference matters. Product marketers have had more than a hundred years to learn the basics of their craft, and they function in a context in which everyone in a company understands that marketing matters. They may not always remember it, nor function as if they ever knew it, but Peter Drucker put his finger on the awesome truth that the purpose of a company is to create a customer. Too many professionals still seem not to have learned that lesson, and think that the purpose of a professional firm is to practice the profession. But for whom? Would any accounting or law firm be able to bedazzle the world with brilliance if it had no clients, nor could get any? The problem is that there is no tradition of marketing in the professional practice, and a mere two or three decades is hardly enough time to establish one.
We know very little about productivity in marketing professional services, compared to what the product marketers know. After all, you can measure the efficacy of a product ad by counting the number of units you sell. Can you measure return on investment in marketing by the number of clients you get the day after your marketing program hits the street?
What do we know, then? We know, by now, the basic skills of marketing that take a stride toward establishing presence in a marketplace. We know enough of marketing skills to make some measure of difference. We know that when we realize that the client is at the core of the profession, it is the client’s needs we must address, and not the litany of services we offer. Those services are smoke if they serve no client purpose or need.
We know that we must recognize what we don’t know, and dedicate ourselves to learning what we don’t know, and not reside in the small world of what we think we know.
Most important, we must recognize that whatever skills we bring to marketing, it is still ultimately an art form, and not quite the science we would like it to be. And as we’ve said before in these pages, if you want to succeed in marketing, then, don't hire the scientist. Hire the artist.
There is hope. For those of us who were marketing professional services before Bates, or did it in those early days after Bates, we can say that marketing for professionals has come a great distance. More professionals now recognize the validity of marketing as an integral part of practice. More marketing professionals bring a sophistication to the process we had not thought possible in 1977, the year of the Bates decision that made marketing for professionals a valid practice to address the hitherto unknown process of competition. When Competing For Clients came out in the early 1980s, it was called the first comprehensive manual on the subject. Today, the body of literature on the subject is extensive, and a lot of it is genuinely instructive and valuable. That’s progress.
But marketing sophistication brings increased and effective competition, which then requires even more sophistication. And the profound changes in the business and regulatory environment we now see breeds a need for greater knowledge, greater flexibility, greater acuity.
There is indeed a mystery in marketing. The success of the marketer, then, depends upon the knowledge, the skill, the enthusiasm that so many of us have. But the secret ingredient that makes it work is the artfulness that’s brought to the process.