The purpose of this research is to examine issues that arise from the phenomenon of advertising and marketing on the part of professional personal-service providers of specialist expertise who are required to obtain occupational licensing, such as doctors, lawyers, CPAs, and psychologists. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background and context in which issue fronts have attained prominence in recent years, and then to discuss the attitudes of the affected service providers themselves as well as attitudes of the public and policies of governing bodies toward the phenomenon. The principal focus will be on services advertising by dentists and lawyers, although much of the commentary on such advertising appears equally applicable across professions affected by the deregulation of relevant advertising protocols.
For decades--one could not inconceivably say centuries--it was customary in the United States for certain providers of professional personal and business services never to engage in overt methods of paid advertising, such as direct-mail solicitation, display and classified advertising in print media, and broadcast radio and television advertising. Professional/academic societies such as the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, and American Dental Association exercised de facto enforcement of bans on formal advertising in articulations of policy that were intended to have the effect of distinguishing the character and competence of associated, credentialed, and licensed professionals from their less credentialed, licensed, or associated counterparts. The fact that doctors, lawyers, optometrists, and dentists did not advertise set them apart from (say) chiropractors, barbers, and opticians. In popular imagination, a certain prestige attached to the former group partly in consequence of the gulf between the promotion-minded marketplace and the supposed nonmarket orientation of professional expert...