Biglaw, Midsize Firms / Regional Firms, Partner Issues, Small Law Firms

Power Niche Marketing: Always Start With Peter Drucker

If you want to be a real thinker in the business or marketing world, you need to read Drucker's work.

By  
on
Peter Drucker (via YouTube)

Peter Drucker (via YouTube)

In this column I have staked my marketing reputation on the theme and theory that marketing is (almost) all about creating, owning and building Power Niches. Last week, I outlined what a Power Niche is – and that definition is found at the end of this article so everyone remembers it, without having to go back to my first article.

In order to move forward and establish the intellectual basis for Power Niches, I start with Peter Drucker. Indeed, he is always a great place to start in the business world. He is one of my intellectual heroes. He was not only incredibly smart; he was also someone who took the time to figure things out and put workable and usable theories together. Drucker, if you don’t know, actually invented the science of “management.” He died a few years ago. If you want to be a real thinker in the business world – or the marketing world – I urge you to read his work.

Anyway, Drucker says that there are two things which every business must do to be successful. If the business doesn’t do those things, the odds of success are not good, and the converse. Can you figure out what they are? Don’t worry, I couldn’t either, but as soon as Drucker told me it was so obvious I was kicking myself. The two things are as follows:

To innovate

To market

Of course! If you don’t “innovate,” you have nothing to sell, and if you don’t “market,” then no one will realize why they should want your product in the first place. But if you put them together, then you have something powerful.

Sponsored

Consider Apple. What would Jobs have done without Wozniak? What would he have had to sell? And what would what Wozniak have done without Jobs? He would have tinkered around until someone stole his ideas or maybe he would just have gotten a job somewhere. If you put the two together; however, you have Apple, which is arguably the most successful company in world history.

So, although I would like to “just” talk about marketing in this column, it is hard to extricate marketing from innovating. If your law firm just does widget-like legal work that is indistinguishable from the legal work of other law firms, you have a serious problem. I will talk about how to solve problems like this in later columns; however, the first step in a successful marketing plan, and in building a Power Niche, has to be some level of innovation.

Let’s look at another very powerful, and indeed in my view the most powerful, thing Drucker ever said, which is when he identified a key and basic question; namely, what is the purpose of a business?

Don’t worry if you can’t get this one either. I couldn’t get it, and I suspect it took Drucker many years himself to figure it out. I was thinking it was probably to serve your customers, to serve your employees, to make the world a better place, to just make money; however, none of that is right. The purpose of a business, according to Drucker, is:

“To create a customer”

Sponsored

Wow! Makes you tingle a bit, doesn’t it? It is the use of the word “create.” He doesn’t say your purpose is to “get” customers or to “sell” to them or to “market” to them. It is to “create” them.

This goes back to the basic idea that you have to do some innovating if you want to market and sell effectively. Synthesizing Drucker, the ultimate plan as I see it is as follows:

“Innovate and market to create customers”

Steve Jobs said this beautifully when he said “don’t ask the customer what it wants; instead, show the customer what it should want.”

Or in another way, “it is not the customer’s job to know what they should want.”

The point here – as both Drucker and Jobs are saying to us – is to

“Innovate and market to create customers”

Please consider this for a few minutes and take a moment to think how it applies to your law practice. Are you just “practicing law,” or are you innovating and marketing to “create” customers?

I used to just be a plain old lawyer, and my career went absolutely nowhere. Now I spend every single day thinking about how to “create” customers – just like Steve Jobs said above – and my career is quite successful. And to be clear, I “really” do this. The purpose of these columns is to teach you exactly how I do it.

This is the first lesson. You have two weeks until my next column. Your homework is to read what I wrote (above). Reread it a couple of times. And think!!! How can you “innovate and market to ‘create’ customers”? You might just be flailing around now and maybe even have no clue what I am talking about. But if you read what the Power Niche is (below) and just turn on your brain, I assure you that your time will not be wasted.

Here is the definition of Power Niche again:

In brief, a Power Niche is a small-sized niche within a bigger industry that no one else yet dominates or owns. The niche isn’t obvious so you have to figure it out and “create” it. You step in and learn everything about it and everyone in it. You tell everyone about what you are doing – incessantly – and become the real “owner” of the niche merely by staking out your homestead in virgin territory. This then becomes a virtuous cycle as the more you know, the more you do, and the more you do, the more you know. Before long you are the world’s unquestioned expert in this (smaller) niche. All of this enhances your bargaining power within that niche. Instead of begging for business in the bigger industry, you now have eager clients paying you top dollar within this smaller Power Niche.

Earlier: Power Niche Marketing: What Is A Power Niche?

Bruce_StachenfeldBruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With more than 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

Topics

, , , , , , , , , , ,