Marketing Professional Services - Revised

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: As any self-employed lawyer, consultant or accountant knows, selling services can be much tougher than selling widgets. The major professional service firms employ huge marketing staffs whose job is to convince potential clients that they need the company's expertise, and to differentiate that expertise from all other competitors. Three marketing professors - Philip Kotler, Thomas Hayes and Paul N. Bloom - have distilled the strategies and techniques designed to accomplish this daunting task into this comprehensive text, which we from getAbstract recommend to anyone running their own services firm and to all those charged with marketing the majors.

Rating:
Summary: An academic's distorted view
Review: As anyone remotely involved in marketing professional services will quickly discern, this academic view bears no semblance of understanding of the unique qualities of marketing a law, accounting, or consulting firm. The authors attempt to fit professional services marketing into a framework of product marketing, resulting in irrelevant, discredited and useless concepts. Furthermore, the book is loaded with factual and conceptual mistakes. Any attempt to build a marketing structure for professionals based on this book is doomed to a vast waste of time, energy and money.

Rating:
Summary: Why Successful Professional Services Firms are Successful
Review: Firmly grounded in theory, Marketing Professional Services is not just another tactical "how to" book. The authors lightly apply the academician's touch to each topic before immersing the reader in relevant examples that bring the topic to life. The underlying key success factors for professional service delivery are illuminated and analyzed in the light of strategic (and tactical) business practices.

Assembled in a logical order, each chapter builds on the preceding concepts for a well-integrated story. However, this need not be a cover-to-cover read.

The chapters can also provide standalone benefit. For example, the Pricing Professional Services chapter comprehensively covers concepts that will enable you to confidently negotiate the murky waters of pricing services without need of digesting the previous nine sections.

Authored by three stalwarts (Kotler/Hayes/Bloom) in the marketing/services-marketing world, this well-cited volume deserves to be kept open on your desk as a reminder that your service is NOT A PRODUCT and should not be marketed as such.

Rating:
Summary: misapplied thinking
Review: I am a fan of Philip Kotler but this book misses the mark. There are some factual mistakes and errors but this is not the biggest problem. The book comes across as a frankenstein of joined together marketing theories and application from many of Kotlers other works and there seems little new here. Additionally, many of the concepts discussed, such as the BCG matrix hardly seem applicable to most professionals, particularly those working on large multi million dollar tenders such as engineers and architects. Having taught marketing at post graduate level using Kotlers text books as the core text, this work becomes even more dissappointing as it seems that there is little evidence that the authors have a solid understanding of professional services marketing as it for the professionals who practice it.

Rating:
Summary: Must-have for professionals wanting to understand marketing.
Review: This book is all about marketing for professionals - lawyers, doctors, accountants, management consultants, etc. It takes a textbook approach to this specialized area of marketing professional services but does so in a fast and effective fashion.

The book starts out by defining marketing and quoting Peter Drucker 'The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous'. Every professional loves to hear that as we all hate selling. The Seven Ps of Marketing are then explained - Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Physical Evidence, Processes, and People. The fundamental way services differ from products is then outlined - intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability along with satisfaction criteria being different and the effect of customer participation.

Ten distinctive problems in marketing professional services are also described - third party accountability, client uncertainty, experience, limited differentiability, quality control, doers as sellers, time allocated to marketing, pressure to react, conflicting views about advertising, and a limited marketing knowledge base.

The rest of the book builds on this foundation. This is one of the most useful and readable books I have encountered on the subject of marketing. It has the perfect combination of theory, practice, and actionable steps that you can find in any book specializing on marketing professional services.

So if you are one of the targeted audiences don't hesitate and just get the book. You will not regret it and at the very least, it will give you a deep understanding of where you can improve in your business. You may feel the book is a bit pricey but the value makes it worthwhile. Good luck!

Rating:
Summary: Back by Popular Demand
Review: This is the update of Phil Kotlers ground breaking first edition on Professional Services. The involvement again of Bloom and the addtion of Hayes has added a new dimension to the work. This book starts with a great introductory section which lays a good gounding and then develops clear and concise apporaches to marketing in this complex sector. Good cases and examples allow you to work through your own business and the book is structured logically to bring clear insights. If only professional services firms had this book open on their desk they might avoid some of the most obvious pitfalls, like appreciating the service from thier clients point of view, improving planning and tactics and ultimately providing better value. A must read.