Brand evolution

The role of brand has truly evolved. For law firms the challenge now is to respond to that evolution and to commit to the creation of a more differentiated proposition, with innovation in the client and staff experience at its heart. By Jim Prior

The appetite for rebranding in the legal sector has never been greater than over the past few years. For some firms the driver for this has been fundamentally strategic, addressing a need to present a more professional, inspiring, globally consistent face to the world. For others it has been more tactical, perhaps seeing a change in corporate status – such as conversion to LLP, or when an acquisition has been made – as a pertinent time for change.

In any case, it seems clear that law firms are considering their brand identity to be an important weapon in the battle to win business and develop their reputation. Tidy graphics, consistency of presentation, intelligent use of imagery, a sense of the firm’s personality, even a touch of wit, are becoming more and more common as firm after firm go through the rebranding process. Indeed, a carefully crafted brand identity and a system for its ongoing management have become as de rigueur in a medium-to-large sized firm as wigs and gowns in the courtroom.

At this point, many law-firm marketers may be sitting back, congratulating themselves on a job well done. With geographic and practice-area presentational anomalies resolved and with a shiny new sign above the door, there can be no complaints about a lack of sales and marketing leverage across the firm; no time wasted reinventing the wheel for every communication need; and, C-suite clients can be semiotically reassured that the people they are choosing to engage with are every bit as slick and professional as they are themselves. The law firm brand, it seems, has evolved. But if you are one of those marketers, then be warned; this is no time for sitting back. The evolution is far from complete and, in fact, the real hard work on your brand is yet to be done.

Reasons to choose
When the momentum started to build for law firm rebrands a few years ago, the early pioneers engineered for themselves a certain competitive advantage. In truth, many rebrands were concerned with solving quite workmanlike communication problems – applying consistency across geographies or practice areas, or creating clearer and easily navigable structures to the brand – but a by-product of this was a sense of personality being made more apparent in the firm’s presentation. And this personality served to engage clients’ attention in new and potentially advantageous ways, creating an emotional and more intangible connection as a layer beyond the rational facts. And, as has been empirically proven, when a strong emotional connection is established between a brand and its audience, the bond between them is harder to break than when the connection is based on rational criteria alone. The argument for rebranding was, therefore, strong and it’s not surprising that most of the major law firms have, by now, decided to join the fray.

But with so many rebrands now complete, the pioneering advantages have been heavily eroded. It was easy to stand out when no one around you was close to your mark, much less so now that everyone has moved up to your shoulder. So, with carefully thought through, well-crafted brand identities now the sector standard, clients’ minds are starting to enquire more deeply into the brand, seeing beyond the visual presentation, and looking for more profound and significant reasons to choose.

And the problem is that they’re struggling to find any.

The heart of the brand
When working on the creation of a brand identity the first and most important question that should be asked is, ‘What is it that the brand identity should communicate?’. The answer to that question should be something that is uniquely true of the organisation it represents and deeply compelling to the organisation’s target audience. A strong brand is one that has such a true, compelling and differentiated idea at its heart and which manages to deliver that to its audiences, not just through its brand identity and communications, but through the realities of all the tangible and intangible experiences it provides. Brands go well beyond graphic consistency and elegant presentation and play a pivotal role in delivering the fundamental proposition of the organisation to its audiences.

But if the proposition at the heart of the brand is anything less than true, compelling and differentiated, then the potential of the brand as a sales and marketing tool may go untapped. In such circumstances, the role of the brand tends to be restricted to the graphic identity, and even this struggles to deliver value beyond basic good housekeeping. This situation is one that we frequently find in law firms.

It is our experience at The Partners, having acted as consultants to a number of UK and international law firms, that while firms are generally well aware of what it is they offer that is true and compelling, they are much less clear on any points of meaningful differentiation. Interrogation around the services offered to clients, the specific skills and processes of the firm and the style and tone with which the firm operates, tends to reveal a somewhat familiar-sounding scenario: the scale of the firm, the expertise of its people, the diversity of its offer and a commitment to client servicing are almost ubiquitous themes. You only need to make a quick trawl across the homepage of the UK’s top thirty (more, if you like) law firms to see the extent to which these attributes have become generic communication themes. So generic, in fact, that they can no longer be legitimately claimed as the basis for a brand proposition. They are really no more than the ‘hygiene factors’ that any firm of significance is required to adopt.

Law firm brands are, in general, undifferentiated. And their power is therefore greatly diminished.

The origins of the problem
It is not difficult to see how this problem has arisen. More so than in most commercial sectors, clients’ expectations of a law firm are not automatically set to expect differentiation – it is competency that they seek above all else. Law firms know this and, often being risk-averse by nature, are fearful of straying into territories that communicate anything else. After all, in a world driven by rational, intellectual, no-margin-for-error work, many would consider being seen as ‘different’ as a potential liability that could alienate, rather than attract, new clients.

The problem is exacerbated by the structure of most firms. Even if there is a theoretical appetite for a more differentiated proposition, the practical mechanics of a partnership structure, with its many stakeholders and decision makers, often makes consensus on which alternative to take impossible to achieve, so compromise in the safe, tried-and-trusted route becomes the inevitable result.

But none of this makes the client’s choice of firm any clearer. If everyone is competent (or at least says they are) then what else is there to decide upon? If you are one of the very largest law firms, or one that is more or less content with your size and market reputation today, then this may not seem like a problem to you – you may have all the clients you feel you need right now. But if you are a growing, ambitious organisation with a desire to build a reputation and a bigger business at the expense of competitors, then you need to break out of the positioning gridlock that has trapped so many firms and differentiate yourself in a true and compelling way.

Differentiating yourself
Differentiation has to be more than an idle claim. It needs to be evidenced in some way. To believe the differentiated claim (to make it true), clients will need to experience it in some tangible fashion rather than just hear it said. And what it is that they experience needs to add real value to their interaction and be compelling enough for them to see it as an advantage versus other offers. Most obviously, it must be genuinely different – something that no one else offers and, ideally, that no one else ever could.

As I have discussed above, looking for truly differentiating ideas in a law firm can be a difficult and sometimes fruitless process – it is commonplace to find nothing significantly different about what a firm currently does. This is why the best place to start looking may not be within the firm itself, but outside. Drawing influences and learning from other businesses and organisations, using lateral thinking techniques, and seeking the opinions of experts from outside of the firm, will yield more inspiring results than a purely internal review.

With limited scope for movement around the basic hygiene factor – competency – it is often not the macro-level product/service proposition that offers up the differentiating opportunity, but the more micro-level nature of how it is delivered. By examining the customer journey in detail, from pre-relationship to final billing, seemingly small opportunities for innovation can be identified that have the potential to significantly enrich the overall experience. To find truly compelling differentiation at this level requires a detailed analysis of the client experience from an independent perspective, and is a broader programme of work than just a series of interviews with the firms’ key players.

With a comprehensive analysis complete, the key to delivering the proposition is to make the differentiation apparent in the reality of the experience that is offered. Innovations in the client experience must be implemented and made real, not left as theoretical ideas or nice-to-haves. This implementation is a task for all staff, not just the marketing department, and internal communications and training are likely to be a significant component to such a programme of work.

What I am describing here is not an exercise in articulating a brand proposition based on an analysis of what the firm currently does, but a fundamental programme of innovation that changes the tangible experiences that clients have. An articulation of a differentiated proposition comes with that, of course, but only after its evidence has been defined.

Beyond differentiation
With a differentiated proposition in place, brand identity, communications and environments can all be redesigned to reflect and reinforce its message. Coupled with the innovations in the client experience, the commercial case for the firm is greatly enhanced. Not only that, but employees will be inspired by their own new experiences of the firm, thus increasing their loyalty and commitment. And, in most law firms, it is staff that are the primary interface between the brand and the clients, so the more they ‘get it’ the more the clients will too. In addition, a differentiated employee experience provides another argument with which to attract new talent – who look for true, compelling, differentiated reasons to choose one firm over another every bit as much as clients do.

In all of these respects, the role of the brand has truly evolved. For law firms the challenge now is to respond to that evolution and to commit to the creation of a more differentiated proposition with tangible innovation in the client and staff experience at its heart.

Jim Prior is managing partner at UK-based design consultancy, The Partners. He can be contacted at jim@thepartners.co.uk