“We know what it takes to be a tiger. Call us and see if we can help.”

At La Guardia Airport recently, I overheard two consultants talking about a lingering illuminated Accenture billboard featuring the firm’s “former” spokesman Tiger Woods:

“At [name of firm] we don’t do advertising—even though we’re pretty big. Look what happened to Accenture… what a disaster…”

“Yeah same at ours: it is just not effective in our kind of business. Remember what Wanamaker said ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted… the trouble is, I don’t know which half!’ We solved that problem by not spending on ads at all.”

“Right. Business development is not about advertising; it’s not about marketing; it’s all about personal selling at the end of the day. Anybody who’s been in our business for any time at all knows that.”

As a fellow road warrior who is also a marketer, I found this exchange to be revealing and somewhat disturbing. Yes, Accenture’s problem had to be dealt with quickly as the firm did—although the realities of outdoor advertising have kept the Tiger ads up for a while longer than his terminated contract. And, certainly, however effective that firm is in delivering on its claim of “high performance,” there are limits to how far even it can stretch its service offering!

I puzzled over how two seemingly sophisticated consulting professionals could hold such a cottage industry view when it comes to what the role of real marketing—including advertising—should be in a professional service business. It’s not a question of either/or—Sales or Marketing—but both/and.

I decided to see if I could gather the perspective of other consultants and uncovered more of what I call “frozen perceptions” from the “marketing naysayers.” I found these other distressing myths from my “unscientific” sample:

• “For us, marketing communications is what the Marketing Group is supposed to be doing.”
• “I’d rather have one good rainmaker than the best marketer you can get me.”
• “We don’t have to do the kind of market research on our own consulting services, the way clients who sell products do. That’s because our partners act as the best kind of market radar and we can quickly course-correct.”
• “When it comes to new business, my experience is that the insight of a smart partner beats the best market researcher hands down.”
• “Why suggest that Marketing should take the lead in the development of new service offerings? We bring Marketing in only after our partners have figured out the new consulting services to develop and sell.”
• “We don’t have to spend a lot of time investigating market segmentation because our partners already know what the key segments are.”
• “Of course, we do performance measurement on our work during each engagement. But we don’t see any need to bring in an independent group for that because our people know best what’s going on.”
• “We don’t use research to analyze the value of every attribute or benefit of our service offerings, trying to quantify what is different from our competitors. We pick up cues from the client — on the fly — in terms of their interest and we flex our pitch accordingly.”
• “Because of the power of personal selling, we could go without any marketing group—it’s not really a necessity.”
• “Market Research can prove anything—we get better, more actionable intelligence on clients and market conditions from partners who are close to the action.”
• “Relationship Marketing?” That’s a buzzword—we do it the old-fashioned way: one client—one partner at a time”
• “Marketing and advertising are fine for impulse purchases — but selling of consulting engagements is a much more complex, long cycle process. And, often includes multiple decision makers and always legal contracts”
• “Brand reputation is important to us, but its earned by what we do, not by what we might say in advertising. Advertising to reinforce the Brand is really something of luxury—for the biggest consultancies. We build our Brand every day face to face.”
• “There may be more sophisticated means of getting and managing leads, but we’re pretty good at it. Besides the best new business comes from partners engaging with clients for more work and referrals”
• “When the marketing people talk about integrating Sales and Marketing, I feel it’s a power grab”
• “Orchestrating multi-channel presence for the firm—that’s just ‘marketingese’ for give us more budget to spend”
• “We are well known for our thought leadership and that comes from our people speaking at industry conferences and our White Papers. Marketing basically helps the firm with getting market presence and distribution for these—that’s about it.”
• “We have a Marketing Dept. and she does very well in getting the firm publicity”
• “Professional selling is strategic. Marketing is tactical.”

These myths function as “frozen perceptions” which block real change, holding back the industry, one could argue, from the kind of reassessment of Marketing that would be required to change the game.

Without diminishing the role of the partner in selling and in the creation of new services, just imagine this scenario for a moment: If the kind of disciplined marketing skills of a Procter & Gamble could by applied—appropriately—by a player in consulting, what kind of industry disruption would we see? What if the world class targeting and relationship marketing of an American Express were executed—appropriately—in the marketing of professional consulting services?

One thing is sure in this imagined world of professional services marketing: the percentage spent on marketing would not be what occurs today—at about 2.5 percent to 2.9 percent of revenue—3x to 5x smaller vs. what major marketers budget.

How sub-optimal is the current spending level? Can any consulting firm demonstrate that what they spend on marketing of their own firm and services is optimal? Yes, there’s an argument that this is partly a definitional issue and that other budget lines could be included under the Marketing rubric and the  percentage marketing spend would, ergo, be higher. But that is an argument for another time.

One would hope that the reality at one international consulting firm is not too typical: in its major U.S. office, there was only one solitary person assigned to marketing, but she was actually doing marketing communications (“Marcom”).

To practice true strategic marketing, a firm has to recognize first of all that marketing is not simply marketing communications. Even today this confusion over “Marcom” reigns in many firms where partners would never use such a reductionistic definition to characterize their client’s business practices.
With otherwise brilliant consultants, this situation is really a case of “physician, heal thyself.”

Strategic marketing—the phrase comes easily, but the practice is another matter. It must encompass a robust range of thought and action. I’ve summarized just a few key practices focused on creating meaningful “exchanges of value” and cultivating long term client-firm relationships. Which of these does your firm practice today? Which are you planning to implement this year?

• Regular qualitative and quantitative research among prospective clients to understand and scope existing and emerging needs—executed by impartial outside providers
• Understanding how your markets segment for each service line and identifying the most valuable and vulnerable
• Efforts to optimize the “benefit bundle” for each of your service offerings—and how you communicate benefits of each service in PowerPoints, White Papers, publicity and advertising
• Establishing budgets for marketing spending and controlled testing to learn what are most effective levels in terms of impact on growth, Return on Investment and learning.
• Practicing more sophisticated targeted marketing—where messaging, service bundle and what’s spent to capture the business is tailored to the varying segments of opportunity and to specific key prospects
• Integration of Marketing and Professional Selling sides of the house on planning, messaging, client support and other activity
• Identification of “buying inhibitors” that are under the surface and held by clients/prospects for the types of services offered by your firm—and knowing this on a quantitative basis
• Doing competitive intelligence for trends, but going deeper to know why your prime competitors won the last shoot out—or why they lost
• Mapping your lead generation process, front to back, to identify “learning leakages” where key information/insights are lost and conversion diminished
• Evaluation of the motivational appeal of all collateral materials using non-traditional research methods. Your firm puts out White Papers, Case Studies, Perspectives and quasi-research, but how effective are these without the knowledge from controlled testing and research?
• Pre-testing new copy strategies and communication appeals for higher response that can drive greater new client interest and leverage your return on marketing
• Post-engagement research to gain feedback on why the client did not agree to expand the relationship and add on projects
• Identifying the “frozen perceptions” about your brand or company, and your competitors, which block the reception in the mind of the prospective client of your message(s)
• Disciplined efforts to integrate your messaging across channels, including traditional media and digital platforms
• More advanced relationship marketing to “bond” the client, soliciting and listening to their feedback, engaging and supporting the in-person interaction that partners pursue—customized to the profile of the client company and individual client
• Tracking word of mouth and word of web to identify key drivers of interpersonal communication and referral behaviors
• Applying robust performance metrics to understand which activities are garnering higher returns—with a dashboard for Management oversight
• Use of independent firms and research specialists to gain depth insights on a blind basis, overcoming the perceptual bias typical of in-house-executed studies

Whether in the midst of an actual crisis—like the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009—or in a post recovery period, those firms that have a more limited understanding and practice of strategic marketing are at greater market risk going forward versus more nimble players. The risk increases, the less robust are your firm’s marketing vision and practice.

This holds true for the biggest firms as well as the smallest. As one of the world’s great researchers, Jannie Hofmeyr, once observed: “The way to slash big brand market leaders to pieces is to find a value that is important to prospective buyers, but not on the radar screen of the major player.” Is that a threat? Let’s say it’s an eventuality for some big professional service firms. It takes a strategic orientation to marketing to accomplish the kind of market upheaval that Hofmeyr talks about.

A wise man once observed about life, and this applies as well to the marketing of professional services: “to see what you’ve never seen before, you need to do what you’ve never done before.”

See where your firm stands on its own Marketing Risk Quotient™ (MRQ) by taking this survey. The results may be quite enlightening and you will see where your firm stands versus others.


Joel Tucciarone is a marketing innovator who has advised well over one hundred major B2B and B2C brands. He is senior marketing advisor for Kennedy Information Advisors, the advisory, custom research unit of Kennedy Information and serves as Senior Director of the Future Track Group. Tucciarone can be reached at jdtucciarone@kennedyinfo.com.