It’s been suggested by several readers that our orientation toward marketing professional services, as opposed to marketing products, is a prejudice. Admittedly, it’s at least a bias against a pervasive academic view that the techniques of marketing a product apply equally to marketing a professional service. And indeed, the most successful professional services marketers tend to look to other professional services firms for answers and the best ideas, as well as for validation of their own ideas and processes.

Still, it would be foolish to automatically preclude any idea that’s been forged in a marketplace of ideas. In a rational world, we take ideas from any reasonable place, accept the good ones, and eliminate the ones that are bad or not applicable. That means that there are things to be learned by professional services marketers from the Toyotas and Microsofts and Dells of the world.

There was a time, at the beginning of the marketing era (just post-Bates), when understanding the difference between marketing products and marketing professional services was important. While those differences still apply, there are values in seeing the parallels.

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