Competing for Clients—Emphasis Is on Competing

There are too many words we marketers use too easily without thinking too hard about meaning or substance. One of my favorites is the most important word in marketing. It's competition. We use it all the time—and then tend to ignore it as we go about the business of marketing.

Why, then, do we do all those seminars and blogs and websites and media releases? Certainly, not for their own sakes. Even the strategies we most often devise tend to lose sight of not just the word competition, but the act of it. Mechanical process performed, it would seem as if for its own sake.

It's been so long since Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (U.S. Supreme Court, 1977)—our declaration of independence from the shackles of traditions that prohibited any promotional activity or what we can now call frank marketing—that we tend to forget what Bates actually did. It gave us the right to compete.

While it didn't say so in so many words, what it really said was, "Now I can go after your clients, and you can go after mine."

What it said was, "Now you can openly pursue a prospective client in competition with other law or accounting firms. And you can use standard marketing tools, such as advertising, press releases and selling, to do it."