Marketing and Knowledge Management Are Joined at the Hip, is the
theme today. How so? Isn’t marketing fundamentally
outward-directed and KM fundamentally inner-directed? Not
in my view. Let’s start with the basics:
- Law firms’ product is knowledge and intelligence;
- Your firm gains a competitive advantage in the marketplace
when your knowledge and intelligence are superior; - So your marketing message has to demonstrate same (that is
to say, show don’t tell); in other words, put
your broader/deeper legal knowledge on display with greater alacrity
and flexibility than your competitors.
As loyal readers know, a core conviction of mine is that—cultural
considerations aside, admittedly a large "aside"—the
business of law firms is not fundamentally different from the business
of corporations. So when CMO Magazine has a piece elucidating
how firms like Jaguar, Delta Faucet, and FedEx, use KM to drive
marketing initiatives, it’s worth reading. Start here:
- Jaguar used KM to coordinate, integrate, and synchronize the
efforts of its worldwide marketing managers and regional dealers,
capitalizing upon such locale-specific intelligence as favoring
print ads in New York City’s mass-transit commuting environment
and radio ads in LA’s car culture (duh?!, you say, but are you
actually doing it?); - Delta Faucet used KM to integrate its marketing efforts with
its financial forecasting models and its factory floor so that,
for example, they didn’t do a massive print run of brochures
on a model about to be discontinued; - FedEx used KM to deliver real-time information to its deliverymen
and sales people from the customer profile database; as a trivial
(or not) example, when the local folks-on-the-ground were empowered
to deliver birthday greetings to individual customers, shipment
volumes on those accounts increased 22% in the following quarter;
and - QAD (never heard of them?—neither had I), which sells
ERP software worldwide (only 40% of their sales come from North
America) introduced an enterprise-wide platform to coordinate
all marketing presentations in a two-way fashion, incorporating
"best practices" from the field as well as suggesting them from
headquarters, and saw $3-million in incremental revenue year
1.
Back to law firms: A cliche of KM guru’s is that the world
is divided into what we know we know (expertise), what we know
we don’t know (opportunities for professional development), and
what we don’t know we don’t know (profound ignorance). Are
there areas of expertise in your firm that exist but you don’t
know about them? Could
they be germane in your next bake-off or beauty contest or RFP
response?
KM, meet Marketing.
