During the Great Recession, we saw marketing attention focused heavily on business development. And why not? Sales were hard to come by as the economy hunkered down amid bleak predictions. Traditional marketing activities seemed to be devalued. Not surprisingly, we perceived brand quality and distinctiveness plummeting in favor of ordinary, undistinguished brand efforts. Was this true or just our opinion? We decided to find out.

We decided to ask firm leaders for their opinions on the state of professional services branding in 2013. The goal was to confirm or deny our own—replacing opinion with fact. Thank you to our respondents from law, accounting and consulting firms of all sizes, with the average firm size at 382 professionals. Over half of our respondents came from firms national and international in reach, but we were happy to see the opinions of local and regional firms represented, too.

While the piece has only recently launched publicly, we've experienced a strong, positive response from clients and prospects, as well as write-ups in CMO.com, brandchannel, National Law Review, Brilliant Results and Holmes Report.