Bumper sticker ‘v’ marketing philosophy

A flashy image means nothing unless you apply the marketing theories that truly differentiate your firm’s offering in the relevant marketplace.

By David Wallace

As the late US cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts (Snoopy, Charlie Brown and co) fame, once commented: “There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.” No matter which shiny bumper sticker featuring a slick slogan is stuck onto a law firm to attempt to position it in the marketplace and differentiate it from its competitors, it is the underlying marketing philosophy that really matters.

Unfortunately, the underlying philosophy – the fundamental way of thinking and acting – in some firms can be out of sync with the message being promoted by the bumper sticker. The problem sometimes arises because bumper stickers can be created more easily and faster than a real marketing philosophy, which takes substantial time, effort and buy-in. Consequently, some firms’ attempts to differentiate themselves remain stuck at the superficial, bumper-sticker level – sometimes even winning marketing awards, but sadly with no actual positive effect on the top or bottom line.

However, our role is not only to communicate messages, but also to create “customer-led demand, which is the only sustainable form of business growth”, as defined by The Marketing Society. This is essential for making top-line growth happen.

With sustainable fee-income growth in mind, one former marketing director of a major London law firm tells an enlightening story of a business-development project she ran a few years ago to identify if there were any discernible differences between the day-to-day behaviours of high-fee-generating partners, and those of less successful ones. She found that those who brought in the most fees tended on the whole to go through the same processes and use the same tools and systems as the poorer performers. But there was a remarkably significant correlation between partners’ fee-earning abilities and their propensity to sign off their e-mails to clients and contacts with a personal note, such as ‘Hope you have a great holiday’ or ‘Good luck in your tennis match this weekend’. By using this evidence to demonstrate that usage of fairly elementary interpersonal skills can be revenue enhancing for lawyers, she hoped that others in the firm would adopt the same philosophy in their dealings with clients. She could, more easily, simply have had an agency create a cool bumper sticker for the firm that proclaimed something like, ‘Friendly people who show an interest in our clients’. But, instead she tried a little harder to delve beneath the surface – in order to make a real sustainable difference by shifting behaviours in the firm in a way that will hopefully lead to higher top-line growth. Maybe she’ll come up with a snazzy, award-winning bumper sticker later.

David Wallace is an independent business strategy and marketing consultant. He can be contacted at davidw@strategypoint.co.uk.