Why Professional Services Marketing 3.0 Matters for Your Future—and What to Do About It

When, in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court (Bates v State Bar of Arizona) struck down the ethical rules for both the legal and accounting professions that prohibited any promotional activity—frank marketing—it introduced the concept of classical competition. This signaled the beginning of the marketing practices we use today.

As frequently happens, this began an evolutionary process that did five things:

 
• It developed marketing practices that were distinctly different from product marketing techniques, although both had the same roots.
   
• It began altering the nature of the firms, ultimately creating the modern firm, which is substantially different from the firm configurations and practices that had prevailed for generations and through most of the twentieth century. Accountants and lawyers who practiced in those early days would be hard put to recognize—and accept—today's firms.
   
• Ultimately, it established competition as the major driving force in not only developing new marketing practices, but in changing the nature of the professional firm itself. Today, mostly everything that law and accounting firms do is rooted in the need to compete, either deliberately and specifically or not.