Last night, I saw a 30-second TV ad called "Business: Inspiration" on Visa's new "Life takes Visa" campaign....


Maybe my brain has been cramped these past few days, but I reacted as negatively to this pitch as I did to seeing yesterday the marcom materials for Jeffrey Gitomer's new book. (And I'm a Visa card holder, too.)
The spot features several scenes of business people in a meeting; each scene features what appears to be professional services people wondering what another firm would do, supposedly about solving a particular business challenge. Each spot strongly implies that competitors are being discussed.
Gag. My reaction is strongly negative to almost everything about this ad.
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The title of the spot is awful. There's nothing inspirational about what's going on in these scenes. Each meeting's attendees look bewildered, and the visual props imply that these business people are only playing catch up. I've never seen any business professional become inspired by being a copycat.
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What is Visa's point? We are supposed to think that "Life takes Visa." After watching the people in the ad ask "What would the other guys do," are we supposed to think that they will rush out and use their Visa cards to beat the other firms at the same game? It just doesn't make sense.
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The whole notion of asking "what would the other guys do" implies an orientation toward competitive intelligence. Yeah, competitive intelligence is a great idea, but certainly not under the circumstances this ad portrays: last minute, scrambling, clueless. If I were their competitive intelligence consultant, I'd put a halt to the meeting immediately and try to set them on a more strategic journey about researching competitors.
This whole issue brings me to a larger point about competitive intelligence. Why, oh why, would any professional service firm undertake competitive intelligence efforts and not include the clients?
So many firms display almost morbid interest in their competitors; it seems they have forgotten where the most valuable intelligence really lies, and that is with clients! "Really," I'd say to anyone interested in undertaking competitive intelligence, "when would any such effort not include client perceptions about the competitors' emerging capabilities and how those competencies match up with the clients' evolving needs?"

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Where Are the Clients in Competitive Intelligence?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Lowe is founder of Expertise Marketing, LLC and author of The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and For All – in Professional Service Firms and Marketplace Masters: How Professional Services Firms Compete to Win. She blogs at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix and her own blog, the Expertise Marketplace.

Before founding Expertise Marketing in 1996, Ms. Lowe spent more than a decade leading the marketing programs for top-tier management consulting and business-to-business organizations. Before that, she spent more than a decade managing and implementing strategies for political candidates and organizations.

She spearheads the only widely disseminated research initiative on strategic marketing perceptions, practices and performance of professional service firms around the globe.

In addition, Suzanne Lowe has written or been quoted in nearly 100 articles on the topic of professional services marketing strategy. Her work has appeared in the a rel="nofollow" href="https://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/hbr/hbr_home.jhtml">Harvard
Business Review, BusinessWeek.com, CMO Magazine, Harvard
Management Update, and scores of profession-specific magazines and journals, including MarketTrends, Marketer, Marketing the Law Firm, Accounting Today, Engineering, Consultants News, Structure, Journal of Law Office Economics and Management, The Practicing CPA, Environmental Design and Construction, Massachusetts High Tech, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, and the Legal Marketing Association’s Strategy. She is a contributor to the second edition of the book Marketing
Professional Services, by Kotler, Hayes and Bloom. She has also been instrumental in the development, writing and publication of five books and nearly 50 articles and book chapters for her consulting clients.

Suzanne speaks regularly around the world to leading trade associations, industry groups and in-house firm audiences. Her work has also been presented internationally, most recently at the American Marketing Association's annual Frontiers in Services conference. She facilitates a Roundtable of Chief Marketing Officers from some of the world's largest and most prestigious professional service firms. She has guest-lectured at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and designs and delivers customized executive education programs in marketing for professional service executives.

She advises the leaders of professional service firms, from small start-up practices to large global organizations.

Ms. Lowe received a B.A. from Duke University.

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