The shortlist is written before you are in the room

A law firm, an accounting practice, an engineering consultancy and an advisory boutique all sell the same awkward product. The client cannot inspect it before buying, and often cannot judge it properly afterwards. Nobody test-drives a merger opinion. Nobody returns a tax structure because it did not fit.

What the client is really buying is judgement, and judgement is invisible. So, buyers do what people always do when they cannot assess quality directly. They look for proxies. Who else trusts this firm? Where have I seen that name before? Did the last thing I read from them leave me better informed?

Marketing, PR and media are the three ways those proxies get made. That is the whole job. Most firms have lost sight of it by treating each one as a separate activity, with its own supplier, its own calendar and its own measure of success.

Three disciplines, one question

Strip away the jargon and each discipline answers a different part of the single question a buyer is asking.

Marketing is what you say about yourself: the website, the newsletter, the LinkedIn posts, the credentials document. It is fully within your control, which is both its strength and its limit. Everyone knows you wrote it.

Media is what gets said about you, or by you, in a space someone else controls. An editor decided your view was worth their readers’ time. A producer phoned your partner rather than someone else’s. The value lies in the fact that you could not simply publish it yourself.

PR is the work of managing the gap between the two, so that what the firm claims and what the market hears line up over years, including on the day something goes wrong.

Marketing makes the claim. Media supplies the corroboration. PR keeps the two consistent. A firm that invests in only one of them is making an argument with a leg missing.

The comfortable channel problem

Ask most professional firms where their thought leadership goes and the answer is the firm website and LinkedIn. That choice is rarely strategic. It is comfortable.

Publishing on your own channels involves no pitch, no editor and no possibility of rejection. Nobody tells a senior partner that the article is too long, too cautious, or says nothing new. The piece goes up, colleagues like it, and the firm records another output.

The cost is that the audience is largely people who already know you. Owned channels are excellent at reminding existing clients that you exist. They are poor at introducing you to a general counsel or chief financial officer who has never heard your name, and poorer still at persuading that person that your view carries weight beyond your own say-so.

An editor’s “no” is uncomfortable. It is also the mechanism that gives the eventual “yes” its value.

The reader is now a machine as well

There is a newer reason this matters and it is commercial rather than philosophical.

Buyers increasingly begin their research by asking an AI assistant. Who are the leading competition lawyers in South Africa? Which firms advise on mine closure? What should I look for in a forensic accountant? The answer arrives as a short, confident list. The buyer never sees the fifteen firms that did not make it.

What those systems draw on is instructive. Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found that 84% came from earned sources (journalism, academic research, government and other third-party sites), with journalism alone accounting for roughly a quarter. Content that organisations paid to place barely registered.

Put that beside what is known about how buying decisions form. Research by Wynter and Omniscient, which tracked 100 business-to-business buying decisions, found that 92% of buyers chose from the shortlist they started with, and 61% had a preferred supplier before any formal evaluation began.

Read together, the picture is uncomfortable. The shortlist forms early. It rarely changes. And it is increasingly drafted by software that trusts third-party sources over anything a firm says about itself. The pitch meeting, where firms pour their best effort, is often a confirmation exercise.

What good looks like

None of this calls for a bigger budget. It calls for the three disciplines to be properly planned. In practice that comes down to five habits.

Start with a point of view, not a topic. “Recent developments in employment law” is a topic. “Most retrenchment processes fail in the first conversation, not the last” is a point of view. Editors, clients and algorithms all respond to the second.

Write for the smartest non-specialist in the room. The reader is a capable business person who does not share your training. If the piece needs a professional qualification to follow, it is a memo.

Place first, then publish. An article that runs in a business publication and is then shared on the firm’s own channels does three jobs. The same article posted only to the website does one.

Build relationships before you need them. Journalists call the people who answered last time, quickly and in plain language. Being useful when there is nothing in it for you is how a name ends up in a contact list.

Measure what the buyer would notice. Impressions and likes are easy to count and easy to inflate. Better questions are whether the firm is being quoted, whether it is being found, and whether new clients say they had already read something of yours.

The risk of staying quiet

Professionals are trained to be careful, and caution has a way of presenting silence as the safe option. It is no such thing. A firm that says nothing publicly has not avoided having a reputation. It has left the writing of it to others: to competitors, to out-of-date directory entries, and now to a machine summarising whatever it can find.

The firms that win the next decade’s work will not necessarily only be the best. They will also be the ones whose quality is easiest to verify.

Your expertise is real. The only question is whether anyone can see it from the outside.