Brand Positioning
Here is a mix of examples of logos, brand names and positioning statements that we have had the pleasure of working with and/or developing for our clients.
Most importantly, note how easy it is to develop creative, campaignable marketing communication for these brands.
Take a look at the websites of 2 similar categories at different stages of maturity:
1. The General Home Services category and
2. A sub-segment of this category ‘Cleaning’
Their brand positioning are clearly shown through their design and content development.
The first is much more mature in terms of marketing communication. Its’ websites project a much more professional and corporate image.
The second is less professional and looks like it is a “small” business, which it is compared to the larger Head Office Marketing driven Franchise!
Why don’t any of our top tier law firms promise to explain the law in layman’s English? Wouldn’t that be nice in our age of information overload, stress and time scarcity? No matter how complex the product or service is, the simpler you can make the customer communication, the more your professional services firm can benefit! Check out www.maxsuper.com.au for inspiration and ideas with content strategy on how to turn the traditionally “the boring and complicated” industry segment laden with jargon into simple fun that sells!
Edward De Bono, the father of ‘Lateral Thinking’ rightly suggests that SIMPLICITY is a crucial competitive advantage in content strategy. The world’s top brands have forever practiced these principles of focus and simplicity while many products and services are still trying to do everything and be everything to everybody. The result is mediocrity.
Why don’t any of the firms say “we know more than anyone about all the legal aspects of mining and exploration and you would be crazy not to use us if you want to dig things up”
It seems that the closer one gets to clients – real people, not people who spend other people’s money, acting and thinking on behalf of companies, the clearer is their positioning and point of difference. One such example is Maurice Blackburn www.mauriceblackburn.com.au, a firm that targets consumers. It does so with some personality and simplicity, both in the television commercials as well as on their website, breaking out of the boring mold their corporate cousins have adopted.
Even some of the small suburban firms have done interesting things with the content strategy in their branding – from the catchy name that has meaning and lends itself to a campaignable creative theme www.amicuslaw.com.au, through to one that focuses on the actual brand experience, www.lawtoyourdoor.com.au which delivers value to busy small businesses by coming to them – a point of difference that is actually valued by their target market. Middletons www.middletons.com.au, was the only top tier law firm that we found that had a great positioning statement, yet they also failed to capitalise on it throughout their website with the brand messages being limited to their banner on the home page.
So, what could the big commercial law firms do better to create standout brands rather than just tinker with their logos and shades of blue? (Warning – if what follows sounds like a Marketing Tutorial, it is only because it seems to be precisely what these firms and their agencies are not doing now.)
First of all, the firms need to work out what it is about them that is really unique and different. A hint here with content strategy – they all hire really smart people, train them well and keep them updated and they are all “full service”… so how does that help a client? What may make a firm (or practice group) unique is if it wrote the legislation for the changes to copyright law for the government and has deep experience in advising on-line publishers on exactly how far the fair use provisions extend. Then the challenge becomes working out how a collection of these types of deep experiences or specialties roll up into something unique for a full service firm (if at all).
Now where is the evidence, proof or in advertising terms “reason to believe”?
Why aren’t the same strict principles of supporting evidence applied by the legal firms when it comes to their own promotional efforts? While every firm promises quality and excellence, it is certainly not an area where any one player can get a competitive advantage over another. In fact, if anything there is a great chance of over promising and under delivering. Quality of service is not something that you can prove to the prospect before they enlist your services or is it? We wouldn’t recommend drawing the lines for the battle of the minds of prospects in the legal industry around quality, however for the purpose of illustrating how this can be done, consider this: for a litigation department it might be for example “we win 93% of the cases we run in pollution mitigation” or “in 10 years, not a single one of our software licenses has ever been unwound – we write the best licenses for vendors”.
Legal firms need to clearly articulate the outcomes that they brilliantly create for their core market. This is the combination of what their market values (quality) and their unique skills and abilities. One firm might create agreements that maximise flexibility for outsource providers. Another may deliver workplace agreements that keep workers on a tight lead or ensure that their clients pay the least possible amount of tax legally possible.
Once these desirable outcomes are defined, the firm can then start to distil out a concise statement of their point of difference. This takes time and work and will cause discussion, argument and concern. It is also a good idea to test a number of these statements on existing clients and see what they think the firm delivers for them.
Finally, once the point of difference is well articulated in their content strategy, then and only then, should firms focus on building their communication strategy? The good thing is, from where they are today, there is plenty of room for an early adopter to get the “first mover advantage” and raise the bar for the rest of the players.
First of all, we should acknowledge that marketing in general, and branding strategy in particular, for any professional service organisation has its own unique challenges. The offering is intangible, so you can’t pick it up and compare it feature for feature with a competing offering. The service also relies on humans to deliver it each and every time; it is subject to a lot more variability in quality than a physical product. This means that the quality of a service offering is based mainly on perceptions and external artifacts such as expensive offices, tailored suits and a difficult to complete degrees. The business is also based heavily on personal relationships and the collective intellectual property/knowledge base that a firm can build.
“…branding, a word misunderstood and misused more than any other in business”
Acknowledging these challenges, however, does not change the fact that the major role of branding strategy is still fundamentally about articulating a clear point of difference, one that is valuable to a clearly defined audience. Now let’s examine branding, a word misunderstood and misused more than any other in business. The goal of branding is to become the name people think of immediately when they want what you sell. The purpose of a Brand is to differentiate between products and services and meet aspirational needs as well functional requirements. Brands are the source of a promise to the consumer.
Exhibit A.
The following is a quote from the 2nd of March 2007 Australian Financial Review article, titled “Skills before Thrills” and worse still made by a principal of a marketing firm that conducted research into the marketing of law firms in Australia:
“Over the last 5 years law firms invested significantly into building their brand….While buyers of legal services are more aware of the number of firms they can choose from, they don’t know what these firms stand for, what differentiates them.”
Do we need to shout it out loud? – BRANDING IS DIFFERENTIATION! Maybe the author shouldn’t have skipped Lecture 2, Marketing 101!!! Maybe what they meant to say was that these firms ‘misdirected a lot of their marketing investment’ or ‘have spent a lot of money making prospects aware of their brands’ which is not the same as ‘building their brand’, in fact in fairness, the author alludes to this by calling it “empty awareness”. Building a brand means that your prospects know the difference between you and your competitor so well that they can clearly articulate it!
Why is it not surprising that the so called ‘branding efforts’ by the aforementioned law firms yielded poor results? Could it be that the advertising agencies and marketing consultants involved also missed a few lectures in Marketing 101? Or is it that they do not have the professional fortitude to stand up to their clients and insist that all drab, boring, chest beating ‘corporate speak’ communication must go?
It seems that Australian commercial law firms have either confused branding with visual image which is only a very small sub-set of the branding discipline (but hell who can blame them, marketing fraternity from practitioners to journalists don’t seem to understand the difference!) or they are collectively too conservative (scared) to really take a stand that makes them different and superior.
Exhibit B.
An article from Lawyers’ Weekly May 2008 cites a number of “rebranding case studies”, one of which is:
“We were keen to come up with an understanding a meaning of the brand that related to everyone. It really came down to two things that were really important to the firm. One was the quality of the work that we do and the second was how we do that work and how we relate to the people we’re doing that work with,” he said. “So for us [the issues were] excellence in terms quality of work we’re doing and building real rapport with our clients, with each other, and with other professionals involved with our work.” Blake Dawson worked on the project with brand consultants, Principals, for the best part of 18 months and it was officially unveiled on November 5 year. The effort paid off, and the rebranding was recognized as one of top five of the year in the 2008 Rebrand 100 Winning Brands awards.”
Is this another case of “Emperor’s New Clothes”? We tried to find evidence of the 2 key messages – quality of work and rapport with clients – that supposedly make Blake Dawson unique, communicated on the company website but with no success. Furthermore, the firm’s Positioning Statement “Would you like to grow a little faster?” unfortunately in no way reflects these 2 key messages. But at least the firm has a Positioning Statement and maybe this will focus the efforts of the company to deliver on their promise and assist clients in growing their bottom line. Additionally, Blake Dawson – www.blakedawson.com is one of the few firms to have at least tried to establish some kind of differentiation by incorporating cartoons in the firm’s marketing communications; however this great idea seems not to have been given enough oxygen. There are only 2 pages of the company’s website graced with this simple, humanizing and differentiating concept – unfortunately allowing a great opportunity go untapped.
The trouble is, all the big commercial law firms seem to be working from the same play book and to have taken the road more traveled – and have ended up being both boring and unfocused in their message.
Little wonder market research suggests that clients don’t know what differentiates one firm from another. Now, at the risk of offending people who know how to sue us for defamation… go to the web sites of the major players and look for a clear positioning statement, or anything that is “benefit focused.” If a first year copywriting cadet from AdSchool submitted any of these web sites for an assignment, they would fail because its “all about me” copy doesn’t give any clear differentiation from the competition.
What’s more, they generally try to be all things to all people. They all say, in effect, “we have a bunch of smart people and lots of offices and know the law and care about excellence…” yawn.
A joke or reality?
A young lawyer, starting up his private practice, was very anxious to impress potential clients. When he saw the first visitor to his office come through the door, he immediately picked up his phone and spoke into it,” I’m sorry, but my caseload is so tremendous that I’m not going to be able to look into your problem for at least a month. I’ll have to get back to you then.” He then turned to the man who had just walked in, and said, “Now, what can I do for you?” “Nothing,” replied the man. “I’m here to hook up your phone.”
Q: What’s wrong with Lawyer jokes?
A: Lawyers don’t think they’re funny, and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.
At the risk of pissing off the very people who can test our Professional Indemnity insurance cover limits, we decided to examine the web sites of the top Australian law firms as well as look at their public relations communication in the business press. What became blatantly obvious was that there is a serious misunderstanding of what branding is and how to do it well, especially amongst the Tier 1 law firms.
Perception is Reality! And the reality is that:
The following quote is from Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon’s incredibly passionate speech to Australian Women Lawyers’ Conference – 29th September 2006, titled – The People Vs Lawyers: The Case For An Ethical (and Influential) Profession. Ms. Roxon was an industrial lawyer and senior associate with the law firm Maurice Blackburn and a judge’s associate to High Court. She is now Australia’s Attorney-General
“…public do not have a warm and loving feeling about lawyers. To say, in political spin, you have a “PR issue” is an understatement. So who are the non-lawyers or the good lawyers these days? Reflecting back through the centuries, lawyers seem to have always been disliked – for their fees, their ability to argue their client’s case (and therefore be seen to believe in nothing) and their skill in employing technicalities to wriggle around truth or responsibility. On the other hand, if ever in trouble, everyone wants one in their corner.”
If you take a look at the web sites of the “leading” commercial law firms in Australia, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Law Institute had issued “good website guidelines” and all the major firms followed along like lemmings.
In terms of their branding – that is a defined point of difference – it is almost impossible to tell what benefits one firm offers over another.
All firms have lots of smart people, do some pro-bono work and have won awards. But what makes you tick? Who are you? How can you help me sue someone’s pants off or protect myself from same? Why would I use you instead of the other 8 glass-tower, high priced legal eagle guns for hire in town? At least when watching Boston Legal, one knew that Crane Pool & Schmidt represent only the most weird and wonderful.
Interestingly, the personal injury “fight for the battler” type firms seem to have a better grasp on their branding (differentiation) and speak to an audience (as opposed to an enterprise) than the “corporate” firms do. Almost without exception, the commercial firms have dull messages that are all about them, and provide no compelling reason why a client should choose them over their competitors.
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