Perfect harmony

Maintaining consistency in brandging at UK firm Maclay Murray & Spens LLP. How the marketing department, with the help of specialist branding consultants, successfully completed a rebrand programme, ensuring the same message4 was being communicated to its clients, external agencies and lawyers. By David Sanders.

People come to legal marketing from many different backgrounds. My own is in sales. For three years before I joined my first legal firm 14 years ago, I worked at Johnson & Johnson (J&J), the medical/pharmaceutical company, as a Scottish territory manager. It was my first sales job and I remember, when I started, my boss asking me to pick the colour of my new car. “What are my options?” I naively asked. “White,” he replied.

Not only were the salesmens’ cars white, they had sequential number plates. More than that, I soon discovered that there were rules about keeping cars clean and tidy, with fines attached if you failed to do so. The company dictated the colour of the suit I wore, the kind of shoes I should have and how my hair should be cut. Finally, they trained us so intensely before we went out on territory that, even now, 14 years later, I can almost guarantee that my demonstration of a blood pressure monitor would be word for word identical to the demonstration of any other salesman from that company – even the apparently off-the-cuff jokes. It was my first exposure to a company that really took consistency in its branding seriously.

But did all this control freakery work? You bet it did. Marketers in J&J had control over every possible variable as they brought their products to the consumer – including the behaviours of the salesforce. That consistency in presentation was enormously powerful and, combined with superb training and fantastic products, it added up to market leadership for most elements of our product range.

Some of you will be wondering what relevance medical devices have to your own work within the legal sector. Well, first of all, I think it is important you understand the level of consistency I considered to be the benchmark and where that standard originates. It perhaps also explains why sometimes we chose to fight some battles to get what we wanted, rather than compromising for an easier life but a result with less impact.

J&J was unusual in that it had identified how important its people were to the perception of its brand, so it was also closer to where we are in service delivery than would normally be the case for a company selling products. Consistency of branding for J&J encompassed the presentation and actions of its people and at our firm, we took this lesson on board by ensuring the branding we came up with had some relevance to how our clients already perceived the firm, before we started the rebranding process, rather than trying to pretend the rebranded firm was now something entirely new. There was ambition and flexibility in what we did, of course, but there also had to be the credibility, which comes from consistency in delivery of the service by the people within the firm. So you have to have a brand grounded in reality.

Incidentally, for that reason, I think it’s very important that you do something entirely different to what we’ve done if your firm is rebranding. Create something that reflects the unique character of your firm and which projects the firm’s personality and culture to your client base and targets. In telling you what we did and why we did it though, hopefully I can highlight some of the issues we had to wrestle with in the process and the decisions we took as a result.

The re-brand programme
Market positioning
At Maclay Murray & Spens, the process of rebranding started around two and a half years ago. At that point, we were embarking on a London merger and were approximately one year away from conversion to LLP, so were offered a golden opportunity to scrap everything and start again. We looked at Clementi, at the increasing commoditisation of the market and the downward pressure on fees, and decided to position ourselves in a way that would maximise profitability. We looked at competitors and noticed that they all made a virtue out of their client care in their promotion and advertising. We looked at what clients said and realised that they took client care for granted. And, at the end of all of that, we came to the conclusion that if we were brave enough to do something different, to say something about ourselves, it would stand out in the marketplace.

Promotions: Very Smart People
Our advertising agency then pitched in. It had read all of our materials and made the point that we were very bullish in our promotional copy, had a clear expansionist strategy and were doing great work, but were very understated about it all in our presentation. ‘You’re obviously very smart people, you should be saying that in your communications,’ the consultants said. And so the strapline, or positioning statement, which ties all of our materials together, was born: ‘Very Smart People’ pressed all the right buttons. It had emerged from all the research we had done into what the fundamental character of the firm actually was. As a result, it didn’t look out of place or odd as a descriptor of the firm. In fact, in our client research, the main differentiator we had (as identified by our own clients) was ‘quality of the people’.

Application and communication
Having identified our positioning, the next stage was application. At this stage we were looking for consistency across the range of our materials. However, we were also looking for impact in the creative solutions employed.

We employ a range of creative agencies on our work. That’s an important decision because, in the search for consistency, many firms employ only one, ‘full-service’ agency. It’s a matter of personal choice for your marketing director, but in my view agencies are seldom among the best in the market at everything. A full-service agency can certainly deliver consistency, but my own opinion is that consistency will come with a compromise on some aspects of the application and creativity. What I’m looking for is each element of our communications to be the best it can possibly be and for that I need to find the best design agency, the best advertising agency, the best web designers, the best public-relations agency, the best direct-mail agency, and so on.

In order to ensure that we have consistency in our branding, while retaining impact in our creativity, we have regular meetings with all of these agencies, who then act as a quasi-marketing committee, discussing solutions and approaches. At the end of the day, responsibility for making sure that all of that creative work looks consistent – that we ‘speak with one voice’ – is the job of the marketing department and comes down to the quality of the initial briefing.

Briefing
An important point about briefing: at the start of this process we told each of our agencies to forget that we were lawyers and to offer us solutions which would fit, for example, IBM consultancy services, Microsoft or one of the biggest banks. That process results in some challenging materials being presented and, as the marketing department, you have to be the people who look at all of this information and decide if it can be applied to the legal market, or if it’s too radical and a step too far. This is the stage at which you have to take the decision to be different. It would have been easy for us to tell our agencies to go away and come back with something that said we do great client care, just like everybody else. Instead, we went with what was being suggested.

Project impact
Looking back, those first ads – based on Einstein’s E=MC squared formula, but changed to E=MMS (illustrated on page 15) – don’t look too outrageous. But I remember waiting for them to come out and wondering what the impact would be, both on the external and internal audiences. It makes our job much more nerve wracking to go this way, but when doing something new works, the feeling of satisfaction is tremendously rewarding. And, at the end of the day, surely one of the things we’re paid to do by our firms is to make these difficult decisions, and to do things that are successful, even though they cut across the accepted norm in the sector. To differentiate, you first have to be different.

My point is that to get the impact we wanted, we didn’t do the work within any sort of comfort zone. We took the proposals from our various creative agencies and we brought them all together to discuss where we would make compromises for the sake of consistency – compromises which we tried to keep to a minimum. In that first phase we launched various items of literature, a re-designed website and a series of adverts, all incorporating common design features and further linked by the Very Smart People line. We had created these first items based on templates, which we now introduced, incorporated within our branding guidelines, a booklet that defines in detail how each of these items should appear. And we put the whole lot out there, knowing that we had done our research, knowing that it should all work and with our fingers tightly crossed.

The results were very satisfying. Our website visits quadrupled in the first six months. More importantly, we could see peaks which correlated to our promotional activity, indicating that those activities were being noticed and reacted to. The website was also placed 16th in the UK, in the 2005 Intendance annual survey, but first for design. In 2006, we moved up to tenth; eighth for marketing. Not bad for a firm at 52nd by turnover and with a marketing department of eight people. Eighteen months after launch we won the 2006 Managing Partners’ Forum ‘European Best Brand in Practice’ award. Having developed these initial templates and by being brave enough to stick to them even when partners wanted to introduce variations, the roll-out of the branding became easy. Evolution was simply a case of saying to our agencies, ‘Use your creativity to take this forward, but stay within the guidelines’. The agencies have responded magnificently and, of course, I get to take the credit.

People power
Lawyers and other staff have a very powerful role in this process and in making branding consistent, perhaps the most important of all. They have to live the brand values and deliver on the brand promise. It is therefore very important that you have a brand and an implementation process which can inspire and affect positively the everyday behaviours of people. We consulted partners, other lawyers and staff at a very early stage. Their opinions were part of the research phase and we listened carefully to what they had to say. They are at the coal face, working directly with clients and their opinions are incredibly valuable for that reason. However, in order to maintain consistency and impact, at the point where we had to interpret that research and come up with a promotional solution, we did that ourselves and then cleared our final proposal through our chief executive, Magnus Swanson. A word on Magnus. I am fortunate in that I have a chief executive who understands how strategic marketing works and what we are trying to do, but he doesn’t want to do it and doesn’t believe he can do it better than me. That’s very unusual and Magnus’ support through this process has been both unstinting and invaluable. If you don’t have that support, I don’t believe you can do what we’ve done and I think you should move firm until you find a CEO with whom you can work like this.

The second stage at which we involved everybody in the firm is perhaps the most important, and rewarding, part of the Very Smart People branding process. It is in how we have used it as an internal benchmark for our behaviours. Working with Robin Shuker of consultancy Brands in Action, we have asked groups within the firm to consider what ‘smart’ means to them and how they can apply smarter solutions to their work, to the benefit of our clients. Crucially, this is not restricted to our lawyers. The process of how we deliver our advice is as important for client satisfaction as the advice we deliver, so everybody has a role, from the receptionist, to the mailman, to the associate, to the senior partner. As a consequence, they all appear in our literature and on our website. Our graphics are photographs of real people, our people.

We have now introduced client-care standards based on the feedback we received from these groups, which also reflect the brand values defined and articulated by these people. So, while we may not have the control that a J&J product manager has, we can point to a level of consistency in the application of our brand, which goes beyond our promotional materials and to the core of how we operate as a business.Best of luck with your branding. ?

David Sanders is director of marketing at UK firm Maclay Murray & Spens LLP. He can be contacted at david.sanders@mms.co.uk