THE STRANGE TASTE OF COMPETITION

 A Marketplace Master Shows How To Learn From Others

MARKETPLACE MASTERS – How Professional Service Firms Compete To Win, by Suzanne C. Lowe. Praeger, Westport, CT, 2004. $39.95 Click here to order.

            Let me say at the outset that this is a magnificent and, in many ways, a unique book – which is getting to be increasingly rare in books about marketing professional services.

            It should also be noted, out of fairness to the author, that it addresses many of the same problems discussed in the new book just published by August Aquila and myself. – Client At The Core. But while the two books cover the same subject, Suzanne Lowe’s book is a difference in the same thing, and the two complement one another.

            There are two kinds of books on marketing. One deals with the how-to – the mechanics and the tools of marketing -- often failing to deeply understand the dynamics of marketing a professional service. The other kind deals with the dynamics – the forces at work in helping a professional firm compete in an arena in which even the word competition is as exotic and strange as the first taste of a raw oyster.

            Marketing professional services is too important to leave to mechanics who know only how to do today what somebody else did yesterday. The result is to trivialize the marketing function – often deceiving the professional into thinking that true marketing is being performed. The true marketing function uses complex and often subtle techniques to help a firm compete in a complex and dynamic professional services environment.

            Those of us who have been doing this from the beginning know that the relationship between the professional firm and its client has altered substantially since 1977 and the Bates decision. To reside now in the things we did in the late 1970s in the name of marketing is as primitive as banging drums to scare away evil spirits as a cure for cancer.

            Suzanne Lowe knows this, and knows it well. To her own experience, intuition, and insight, she brings a new ingredient — the science of research and the art of interpreting the data. What she knows from experience and insight, then, is bolstered and informed by what her extensive and meticulous market research tells her.

            Her technique is to survey thousands of firms, which she did during a five-year study, to discern what works and what doesn’t work, backed by factual research into the best practices of successful and not so successful competitors.

            From this experience and research she divines three building blocks of a market-driven infrastructure…

• Looking out -- using market research to understand the market, the competition, the best practices used by other successful firms. The idea is gain knowledge and benefit from it by understanding what works and what doesn’t work, and then building on the knowledge.
• Digging Deeper – “ I believe,” she says, “that the professional services sector, whose very foundation is based on intellectual capital, has yet to apply its collective brainpower to truly dig into its marketplace.” Digging deeper, she says, means capturing, organizing, and mining data to discern past potential client and marketplace patterns…going beyond image-based positioning and branding campaigns to become truly different from competitors. (amen).
• Embedding Innovation. This means, she says, deliberately incorporating support of innovation into a firm’s practices and policies. In other words, building the marketing culture, predicated on mining a firm’s intellectual capital.

It’s not just that she is saying – and quite well and clearly, too – the very principles The Marcus Letter has been espousing these long years, but she backs it up with reams of data, examples, and case histories. Except for the fact that she understands how all that she proposes reaches to the bottom line, this could almost be an academic text in it’s extensive detail. But it’s not academic – it’s pragmatic.

She avoids, too, the danger of most best practices and benchmarking studies, which are usually assessments of where other people have been, with no clear vision of how that experience can move the process forward. Benchmarking, at the same time, is too often a measure of what others have achieved, too often without an understanding of differences between firms that are benchmarked. Benchmarking and best practices guidelines are too often the tail gunner’s view.

In a sense, Marketplace Masters, like Client At The Core, is a visionary book. In the almost thirty years since Bates introduced competition to the professions, many things have changed. What has changed more slowly is the cultural difference between the professional and the marketer. Both books see a world in which professionals move into the 21^st century with a new paradigm of practice – one that recognizes that in the professions, the nature of the practice will be shaped not by the professional, but by the client. Both books may come at that conclusion from different places, but they both arrive at the same point.

HOME