Do solicitors value their reputation as a marketing tool?

The following statement was made to me by a solicitor ‘Clients often do not fully understand what they are buying, hence any client review is meaningless’. I take the opposite view – it is because clients don’t know exactly what they’re buying that they rely on reviews from others.

My question is – ‘Do solicitors value their reputation as a marketing tool?’

A few observations:

• People will ‘buy’ on reputation but many law firms don’t seem to want to ‘sell’ themselves on that basis.
• Is this part of that strange paradox where collectively solicitors seem sometimes not particularly highly thought of; but individually, between the client and the solicitor, the trust is absolute.
• The bigger picture must be ‘How to leverage the role of the trusted advisor?’; to engage more regularly with clients and potential clients by providing services that clients would be happy to purchase from their legal advisers.
• Competing on price makes no sense at all and client’s perceptions of value are certainly not just about the cost of legal advice.

I would be most interested to hear your views