An Introduction into Professional Services Marketing

Professional services marketing (PSM) is primarily based on intangibles such as relationship and value and has four major differences from the marketing of a goods or product base business.

Firstly, in PSM the client purchases are generally intangible, for example, a conveyance on a house. The client may never see the conveyance form as they will be kept as security by the mortgagor, usually a bank or building society. Secondly, the service may be based on the reputation of a single person such as a hot shot lawyer such as Nick Dawson, the highly recognised solicitor for North West England celebrity speeding cases. Thirdly, with PSM, it’s generally more difficult to compare the quality of similar services unless you are talking a ‘commodity’ such as conveyances on new houses. And finally, the professional services buyer generally cannot return the service unlike a faulty product such as a kettle.

So whereas in product marketing, marketeers talk about the traditional “4 P’s,” Product, Price, Place, Promotion, in PSM there are three additional “P’s” consisting of People, Physical evidence, and Process. Charles Revson, one of the founders of Revlon, the Global cosmetics company once famously said” In the factory we make cosmetics, in the store we sell hope” This especially true of many litigants going into expensive court cases.