Marketing the Marketing Consultants

post # 349 — April 6, 2007 — a Careers, Client Relations post

There are now a HUGE number of consultants who advise professional firms out there, and probably the specialty with the largest number of practitioners is advising professional firms how to market themselves.

Which, of course, raises the question of how these marketing consultants go about marketing themselves.

As an author or blogger, I receive a large number of requests to endorse or review books being published by these marketing consultants, and it’s very hard to be selective. Most of them are eminently sensible, but I have to confess that few make me sit up and say “Wow, I never thought of that!”

But then again, perhaps I’m not really the target audience for these books. Many of the authors are trying to serve people NEW to thinking about marketing, not observers, practitioners and consultants like me who, for better or for worse, have been trying to make sense of it for a long time.

So, I’m actually not in a position to evaluate how effectively these books serve their marketplace — what may strike ME as simplistic and familiar may actually be a very useful way of presenting really useful ideas and suggestions. It’s just that I’m too jaded to tell.

As a result, if I don’t review your book or give you an endorsement, it may be a GOOD sign that you have written your manuscript well, for a completely different audience.

One of the problems of being around for a while is that an idea needs to be really new or counter-conventional to stand out, while the truth is that the need out there is not for new ideas, but for old wisdom communicated in better ways that can command attention in ways as the old ways lose their effectiveness due to familiarity (or from the simple fact of being old.)

But then, that’s probably what all consultants have been doing from time immemorial.