How do the professional businesses market themselves?

This sharing is basically a discussion. Probably some of the beautiful marketing minds from the forum could help me to ease my question. I have been applying for a lot of jobs for the last couple of weeks. I always have a dream to be a consultant one day. Therefore, to be accepted by one of the huge management consultant companies would be a fairy tale to me.

In researching the management consultant companies, I came across some great names in the industry such as McKinsey&Co., Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain&Co. It is amazing to hear and read what they have done to the society. For instance, McKinsey was hired by the Indonesian government when Aceh was devastated by the tsunami.

In the 1970s, BCG created and popularized the "growth share matrix", a simple chart to assist large corporations in deciding how to allocate cash among their business units. The corporation would categorize its business units as "Stars", "Cash Cows", "Question Marks", and "Dogs", and then allocate cash accordingly, moving money from cash cows toward "stars" and "question marks" that had higher market growth rates, and hence higher upside potential.

Bain&Co with its slogan “helping makes companies more valuable” has consistently helped their clients to outperform the S&P index by 4 to 1 ratio.

These examples are just a few from many other that could show how popular and great they are. In accounting there are the big four, PWC, Delloite, KPMG, and Ernst and Young. In engineering there are, Kellog Brown & Root and Honeywell. I refer to these companies as professional companies.

The question is how they market themselves in order to excel their services compared to the competitors. Obviously, I have not seen any TV, magazine, and any other form of advertisements from these companies. Is it only their brand that creates the sales for them? Is it only words of mouth?
If one day we would like to create a professional company what do we have to do in order to compete these companies? How do we market ourselves? Please share and help me to reveal these questions.

David Herlambang

MarketingFirst