B2C Discovers What B2B Already Knows

Ad Age magazine reported recently on a sweeping demographic study they conducted in anticipation of the 2010 census (White Paper is for sale @ $249!) that discovered that there may no longer be any consumer group called the “Average American.” In other words, the market has become so fragmented that no one group dominates.

Big wOOt! If you’ve been in business to business marketing in the last decade, you’ve already found that there is no mass market. The fact that consumer marketing has lost its “average” mass consumer market is just confirmation of the continuing devolution to markets of one. In legal marketing, for example, panel after panel of general counsel continue to describe circumstances and needs that differ dramatically from client to client.

While expectations of professional services providers continue to revolve around the unhappy experiences of clients (“Don’t” needs, rather than “Do” needs), one common observation is that providers need to be intimate with the client’s industry and business structure in order to anticipate required services, rather than to react as “order takers” to assignments based on client demands.

I had the pleasure of hearing Bill Flannery speak just this week on this exact topic. Bill’s WJF Institute is renowned in the professional services field for its insight and innovation in business development training and programs. As a former IBMer (decades ago, as IBM transformed itself from a hardware to a services business), Bill was privy to many of the business innovations that kept IBM a market leader, and still do. The lessons Bill conveys to his clients, surprisingly, have remained essentially the same since the late 80’s, and they are lessons that the legal industry, sadly, has not yet the wisdom to adopt.

Clients for professional services are markets of one. Regardless of the foundation of business issues and services needs that are common between them, each application of the intelligence and instruments are different every time. Clarity of these unique needs is essential to client satisfaction. Bill’s admonition to the firms that hire him is they can get this market intelligence through a simple tool: “Ask the client.” Yet, many firms, especially in the legal space, have significant call reluctance in this area.

One way to get around the individual practitioner’s psychic barriers is through a team process, which Bill advocates. The Legal Marketing Association‘s white paper on “Client Service: Differentiating Your Firm One Client At A Time” covers much of the recent research and tactical application of this principle (full disclosure: I wrote this paper). There is an array of excellent consultants in addition to Bill’s firm (Wicker Park Group, Hildebrandt Institute, Altman Weil, etc.) that can assist law firms and other professional services providers to implement such a process.

The fact that there is no “average” consumer may be a new recognition in the consumer market, but it has been this way for a long time in the professional services industries where I’ve worked my entire career. Are there other trends in consumer marketing that we in the professional services space can illuminate for our marketing brethren?