Feature

posted 25 Aug 2010 in Volume 13 Issue 1

Masterclass: Leading by reputation

Director Tim Prizeman at Kelso Consulting reveals the practical steps law firms can take to become known as thought leaders in their target markets.

Five things you will learn from this Masterclass:

1) Why you should be monitoring and promoting thought leadership

2) How to leverage on growing demand for online media

3) Which questions to ask before approving a budget

4) How to take full advantage of the investment of resources

5) How to quickly build insights and develop reputations

Thought leadership is very different from traditional marketing methods. It focuses on creating and then sharing insights on important trends in order to gain a reputation for knowledge. By comparison, the traditional approach is to keep everything proprietary while focusing on sales messages and capabilities.

Many law firms are following other professions, particularly management consultants and accountants, in establishing projects that build their reputations and gain new clients. While larger firms are able to afford costly research programmes as the basis for thought leadership, smaller firms can use their nimbleness and close commercial involvement to highlight their advantage.

A lot of the material on marketing at professional firms deals with channels, i.e., getting the website right, having a newsletter, having a Twitter feed, holding seminars, getting press coverage. But often it forgets about the need to generate regular and interesting content (interesting to the recipient!) to make these channels work.

Certainly, thought leadership can very cost-effectively fill this gap. A well thought-out project will provide strong content for re-use across all channels, creating genuinely integrated campaigns where a strong message is delivered repeatedly through a variety of media so that it stands out against the background noise.

Being different

Ultimately most clients, except perhaps those with legal backgrounds, do not want to engage in technical legal discussions. They want to know about what the major business opportunities and threats over the horizon are – it is here that the opportunity exists to create impact with ideas, advice and analysis.

The table ‘Comparing legal services’ summarises some of the ways that thought leadership differs from the traditional law firm approach of emphasising technical capabilities. Thought leadership focuses on the sharing of innovative ideas and insights, particularly around emerging and future issues, to demonstrate understanding of important trends affecting clients.

Often, moving away from comfortable technical areas to discuss broader trends and their implications causes discomfort for partners. Yet, it is this transition that separates a legal specialist from a business adviser.

There is also a misnomer that thought leadership is about a large research project resulting in a big written report. While this is indeed sometimes the right tactic, it is not the only one: ultimately two of the business world’s most influential soothsayers are Warren Buffett and George Soros, and neither of these publish big reports or commission opinion polls – they let their expertise do the talking! Maurice Saatchi is another great example.

Firm-wide objectives

When considering developing a thought leadership approach, it is worth considering your firm’s objectives and whether it will help to achieve them. For instance, are you having problems getting meetings at the right level or are you losing out to a ‘safer’ brand? Perhaps your firm is just not seen as a credible player or knowledgeable in a particular market. Perhaps the market is changing and you are not clear what the impact will be on businesses. These are the sorts of big marketing challenges where thought leadership can help.

Sometimes it may be opportunistic, such as a campaign to position the firm as the expert ahead of impending major regulation or other changes where there is commercial advantage.

However, do make sure that the investment in time in such a project will tackle the problem or create the opportunity. For instance, if you are losing a lot of pitches in a sector it may be because you don’t know enough about it – or it may be because your team is simply poor at pitching!

Explicit objectives

Right at the start, be explicit about the programme’s objectives. For instance, are you looking for prominent press coverage, brand awareness, influence on regulators, changes in attitudes, business leads, or new projects from existing clients?

This is particularly important as such projects can be very time-consuming, and there is often a tendency for so much effort to be put into producing the report that once it arrives there are no plans or energy to do anything with it. This is an important area to focus upon: what will be done to harvest value from the programme and when will there be payback on the investment?

That does not mean you have to be short-term in your approach. Building a well-recognised reputation for expertise takes time. However, you should want to know the timescales and landmarks along the way to achieving this. For instance, where should the programme be in three months, six months, a year, and so on.

These might be billing objectives, but they could also be specific events (such as holding an industry conference) as well as ones relevant to the objectives. For example, this could be having a certain number of meetings with prospects, greater traffic to your website, improved awareness of your firm by target audiences, and greater volume of press coverage on the issue compared with your competitors.

Getting started

On several occasions I have found partners who, having not done a thought leadership project before, have embarked on a major project and it has been so time-consuming that they never want to do one again! This is a shame, as a great reputation is not built overnight, and one of the secrets to success is repetition – both because you get better at it and because your market starts to expect your report/event/research.

While it may be tempting to launch straight in with a big report or sponsorship of a leading conference, unless you have the resources and expertise to capitalise on these, I suggest starting smaller and growing – that way you build up your expertise with easier to manage and less costly tactics.

Pre-budget considerations

Questions to ask before approving the budget include:

· What is the commercial aim of the campaign?

· What are the new business opportunities and specific objectives, and how will they be measured?

· Are there sufficient resources in place to ensure the programme is exploited?

· Who is the overall leader to take authority and accountability for the programme?

· If the programme involves high amounts of speculative expenditure, what is being done to de-risk this in advance?

· How will the insights gained be utilised within the firm?

Small budgets

You don’t have to be large to undertake successful thought leadership campaigns. Smaller firms have the advantage that their partners often have much closer and broader relationships with their clients, while their comments don’t need to be tempered by the concern large firms have of upsetting the clients in other departments.

Good areas to start with are discussion dinners or similar events with clients, to create some sort of forum for looking at ideas in more depth (a bit like your own focus group). Perhaps invite others along, such as someone from a regulator, an informed politician and/or an academic. This may well, by itself, generate enough insights for some sort of white paper or other thought piece that can be used to start the ball rolling on web content, articles or further research.

Small firms should also not feel that the media will ignore them. While journalists naturally tend to approach large firms because they know their name and assume they have an expert on the subject in hand, they similarly don’t like always relying on the same small group of spokespeople and are happy to talk to smaller firms when approached – provided they can quickly demonstrate they have something to offer.

Getting into the main business publications and national newspapers certainly is a good way to demonstrate you are recognised as a leading commentator on a particular subject. Getting broadcast coverage impresses the people who already know you and is very powerful if you are aiming at private clients.

Programme outputs

Outputs from a thought leadership programme include:

· Published reports

· Press coverage

· White papers (shorter guides and opinion articles)

· Seminars and webinars

· Conferences (own or sponsored)

· Internal knowledge sharing and training

· Case studies

· Slide decks for presentations

· Video interviews

· Diagnostic tools for use with clients

· New services

Examples of success

Strategy consultants McKinsey & Co are the pre-eminent example of consistently producing insights and research to build a huge reputation and also shape the debate – whether through their quarterly journal or through online and Twitter resources. As an example, the term ‘the war for talent’ was coined by them. Once they were a small and little-known firm!

There is often an assumption that law firms should do thought leadership on legal matters. While this is a good place to start, particularly if they are looking at the impact of impending or recent significant legal changes, law firms should not limit themselves to these areas.

For instance, the infrastructure team of international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer produces a heavyweight annual Outlook for Infrastructure report looking at the financial, political and other trends affecting major infrastructure programmes. The word ‘legal’ only appears once in the 25 pages of its 2010 edition, while the word ‘law’ does not appear at all (by contrast the word ‘financial’ appears 21 times).

Mid-tier UK firm Clyde & Co, by contrast, has built up a strong reputation for Middle East expertise through consistent promotional and PR activity linked to this area without a huge investment.

Leverage social media

The growth of online media reinforces the importance of having strong content and interesting views. Social media works on the basis that you comment on and recommend content that you find interesting, whether through emailing the link, re-Tweeting, recommending it through services such as Digg, or simply leaving a comment yourself on the site.

Whatever your views on social media, it is increasingly popular with many people, including senior business decision-makers. This will become even more pronounced over the next few years as people’s preferred reading platform changes from print to increasingly usable gadgets like the iPad and Kindle, meaning online media will become even more ingrained in our daily activities.

Strong insights and novel ideas have always enabled firms to stand out in their markets. We can expect existing trends to accelerate this to the advantage of law firms able to use the opportunity to build powerful reputations that transcend their legal expertise.

– timp@kelsopr.com