Business Writing for the New Services Marketplace
There’s a new market culture that service professionals can no longer afford to ignore or opt out of. It goes by different names, including: the conceptual age, the experience economy and the creative age. But, the given name is largely irrelevant. It’s the market’s core message that really matters to service providers.
Blogger Hugh MacLeod beautifully captures this message in his now-classic commentary, The Hughtrain. If you prefer the quick-fix version, MacLeod gives voice to the new professional services consumer in this memorable quote: “We are hungry. Meaning is the prey.”
This quest for meaning influences consumer decision-making. Professional services consultant David Maister and co-author Lois Kelly illustrate this point in an article titled Marketing is a Conversation.
They suggest that it’s high time “we stopped thinking of marketing as a one-way propaganda campaign.” Instead, marketing is best viewed as a conversation in which we openly invite our business prospects and clients to share their “ideas, beliefs and perspectives” with us person-to-person.
Maister and Kelly don’t see this as a one-shot proposition, but an ongoing exchange that compels clients to regularly air their core “concerns, issues and needs.” This person-to-person dialoguing doesn’t have to be face-to-face. We can invite and nurture it through the content we write for our blogs, newsletters and other client communications.
