The Market Orientation of CLG

The organization I work for is a very small law firm, consisting of one attorney, one paralegal, and myself, the business manager. In the Chalk Talk, we learned that market orientation has three components: 1) customer focus 2) competitor focus 3) cross functional teams. The "lifeblood" of market orientation is market research.

Our firm, Champion Law Group, is strongly client focused. The Bar Association as well as most attorneys would frown upon legal clients being referred to as customers. Indeed, many attorneys bristle at the idea of law being a "business" at all.  The firm's attorney is very much in touch with what clients and potential clients need. To that end, in light of current economic circumstances, a retainer is rarely required and flexible payment plans substantially increase legal access for those who might not otherwise have it.

The firm is not very competitor focused. This is mostly due to the abundance of clients; by waving the retainer and allowing payment plans we have more potential clients than we could possibly take on.

As for cross-functional teams, in a three-person organization we really can't help but have cross functional teams, while we all have our own areas of responsibility, and there are some things only the attorney can do.

Market research has been largely ignored, again due to the abundance of clients. As it is my plan to grow this firm, this is not an area that can be ignored much longer.

As for how my colleagues would respond to some of Drucker's ideas, I have been thinking about that quite a bit since beginning Cohen's book.  The idea that the goal of business is not profit maximization resonates strongly in this firm. Having an explicit goal of profit maximization might even violate the Rules of Professional Responsibility, which could result in our attorney being disciplined by the Bar Association.  However, the proposition that the goal of our business is to create a customer/client does not sit well either. Lawyers are essentially professional problem solvers (and professional secret keepers) and so "creating a client" could be interpreted as creating problems the lawyer then must be paid to solve. It may seem like semantics, but most licensing jurisdictions' Rules of Professional Responsibility allow an attorney to be disciplined for doing something that creates the appearance of impropriety; actual wrongdoing need not be proven.

The mission of CLG is to solve clients' problems with integrity, efficiency, and humanity.  Perhaps we could adapt Drucker's principle to the goal of our business being to create repeat clients.  That gets us closer to what would be acceptable in the legal world, however I think the problem is with the word "create". There is an argument that it reasonably implies the lawyer is somehow contriving client problems to increase the lawyer's fee, which is partly what the Rules aim to punish. Remember the standard is the appearance of impropriety not actual wrongdoing.

While word choice is very important to a lawyer, I do not think Drucker would worry too much about the exact verbiage. I think that what he was getting at is that businesses ought to be people-focused and not money-focused. This dovetails nicely with the mission of CLG. 

My Understanding of Marketing

As I begin this Marketing class, I have been thinking about what exactly marketing is.  I have understood that marketing and selling are not the same thing, but I thought marketing is more closely related than Drucker on Marketing explains.  I conceptualized it as selling being the act of having the product or service a customer wants when they want it and then convincing them to pay the price you are asking.  Whereas marketing is better described as the as the actions taken to create consumer demand for the product or service you are then going to sell.

Drucker makes it clear this is not the case, though his conception of what lay people consider selling and marketing are not exactly what I thought them to be.  I wanted to see what other people think marketing is, so I looked up a couple different definitions.  The American Marketing Association defines it as "Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." (http://www.marketingpower.com/AboutAMA/Pages/DefinitionofMarketing.aspx)  While Investopedia defines it as "The activities of a company associated with buying and selling a product or service. It includes advertising, selling and delivering products to people. People who work in marketing departments of companies try to get the attention of target audiences by using slogans, packaging design, celebrity endorsements and general media exposure. The four 'Ps' of marketing are product, place, price and promotion."

If Drucker's definition of marketing can be summed up as "creating a customer" then I think that my own as well as the two definitions above are not so far away from his thinking.  I think Drucker saw great importance in keeping the focus away from profit maximization and on creating customers.  At first glance it seems like splitting hairs; after all, you are creating a customer so that person will give you their money.  From their money comes your profit.  But 'creating a customer' humanizes the process in a way that 'profit maximization' cannot, and even can be diametrical to.