In the conditions of rapid growth of service industries and, above all, business services, the importance of advisory services (consulting) is steadily enhancing for the domestic economy and the growth of its competitiveness. The article analyzes the basic processes occurring in the modern Russian market of consulting services, the trends and patterns of its development, including the growing processes of concentration and centralization, the underdevelopment of market institutions, the lack of legislation regulating this market segment, structural defects associated with the excessive income growth of the management consulting. All this allowed us to draw some important conclusions about the unstable and contradictory nature of the development of the domestic market of consulting, the deformation of its structure and the absence of the state policy in the sphere of regulation of the consulting services market, and to develop recommendations for its stabilization, including the improvement of legislation in the field of intellectual property, the expansion and strengthening of the foreign economic positions of the consulting companies in Russia, the efficiency improvement of their participation in the international division of labor. The article is intended for students studying methods of conducting marketing research on the market of consulting services, teachers of the discipline "Marketing in services", "Consulting" as well as for marketing managers and managers of consulting companies elaborating strategies for their development.