Sometimes it’s improvement. Sometimes it isn’t. What role will you play?
By Bruce Marcus
Professional Services Marketing 3.0
EDITOR’S NOTE: CPA Trendlines was privileged to have a long relationship with Bruce W. Marcus, who was ahead of his time in his thinking and practice in marketing for accounting. We are publishing some of the late expert’s evergreen work, which retains wisdom for the present.
Speaking of change, as we have been, in the several months it took me to write my book and to choose from the hundreds – maybe thousands – of articles I’ve written over the years, a great deal has changed. And not just trivial stuff.
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The movement to replace the hourly billing with value billing has accelerated. Firm mergers, consolidations, new boutique firms that bear little resemblance to the historical professional firms, new technology that makes obsolete technology that was itself only months old. It seems that observations (I don’t make predictions) that I made decades ago about the need to go outside the firm for new sources of capital to finance growth have turned out to be accurate. New professional/marketers partnerships are springing up. Professional Services Marketing 3.0 is in full swing.
But there’s an apparent paradox here. In the first half of the book I talk about change – in the second half I write about marketing practices that haven’t changed in the decades since Bates turned the professional world upside down.
Well, not so paradoxical. In the world of carpentry, they build furniture and houses using the same tools that have been standard for centuries, even though those tools have been streamlined and redesigned and improved. Still the same tools. So it is with marketing.
The tools of marketing, with the exception of new media and new methods of communications, are still the same tools we used since at least the turn of the 21st century. We just use them better. And we have several new media, which seem to be new tools, but aren’t really. They’re just different versions of the earliest means of communicating. We’ve gone from shouting out of caves, to carving messages in stone, to the printing press, radio, then television, and now the internet and the social media.
Yes, there are subtle differences. The news story is written differently today than it was 50 years or so ago. I’ve never fully subscribed to “the medium is the message,” but I’ve written for years that the way the same message is delivered differs from one medium to the next. For the well trained and experienced marketer, that’s no big deal.
Some interesting points. Change is inevitable. An old vaudeville line from the early part of the 20th century (but still valid) comes to mind: “Change your act or go back to the woods.” When the world in which you function changes – especially if there’s a valid reason for the changes (like response to a changing economic environment) – you’d better change too. In professional services, tradition is good when you stick to the basic principles of your practice. But in a competitive environment, in which you compete by improving the way in which you function to better serve clients, you can still streamline and accommodate without destroying professionalism and integrity.
There’s a good example of that in the automobile industry. First came the invention of the power-driven vehicle, which threatened to replace the horse. Then came the mass-produced car. In black. Then came the car in any color, plus innovations like the electric starter, then came the flashy vehicle that automakers saw – and sold – as a sex symbol. All transportation, all a difference in the same thing, all evolution, the result of which was … change.
Another interesting point. In any process subject to evolutionary change, the future – always hard to predict – becomes even more so. Why? Because the stages in every evolutionary process are affected by random events that are unpredictable. This is a point I tried to make in earlier chapters. An example is Facebook. It could not have been invented had not the internet been invented. Who could have foreseen that this campus-based program would have evolved as an international medium that’s become integral to the business world? Who could have predicted LinkedIn, or even Twitter/X? Who could have predicted that the internet itself could have so changed communication to the point of diminishing newspapers so close to obsolescence?
I have always preached that the starting point of any writing should always begin with the question, “What do I want readers to know, think or feel after reading what I write?” I’ll make it easy for you.
I wrote my book to demonstrate that the world in which accountants and lawyers function has changed, and done so as a result of Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, which bred a new world of competition in the professions.
In order to compete in this new world, lawyers and accountants had to learn a new art form, called marketing.
This started an evolutionary process that is resulting in new forms of practicing law and accounting – new business models, new approaches to productivity to better serve clients, a new path that is resulting in change to a heretofore impenetrable professionalism.
Where once the professionals thought that marketing was ancillary to a practice – that marketers were from a different world – the new professional realizes that marketing is as integral to a practice as, say, cash management.
And now, professionals are learning how to participate more actively and effectively in the marketing process.
That’s Professional Services Marketing 3.0.
Will there be 4.0? Probably. But that’s up to the world to come. And as I said earlier, prognostication is a mug’s game.
What to do then?
Keep your eyes open. Watch it happen. Even help it happen. But recognize that ultimately, change will happen, whether you like it or not. Whether you help it or not, it will happen.
