KM & Marketing: The Great Synthesis

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.