Deep impact

In competitive times, it is tough to make an impression as a new post-merger law firm in a new market. Well-thought-out branding, however, will be an essential part of success.

By Clara Boza, chief marketing officer, K&LNG

The ability to make an impact as a new law firm in a market that doesn’t know you well is a big and not uncommon challenge for law firms – especially those merging across the Atlantic or expanding into any new territory, as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham (K&LNG) did not long ago.

The merger of US-based Kirkpatrick & Lockhart (K&L) and the UK’s Nicholson Graham & Jones (NGJ) was one of the largest Anglo-American law-firm combinations in history. In the UK, we had the name recognition and legacy of NGJ so we were not starting with a blank slate altogether. Nevertheless, we did face a few notable challenges:

How would we introduce our new firm as one that had much more to offer than either NGJ or K&L had on their own?
Next, how would we articulate our brand, the sum of the qualities that our clients have told us over the years they value in each of us, and that drew our two firms together in the first place?
Finally, how would we draw attention to the firm, its expanded presence and expanded capabilities in ways that were fresh, compelling and genuine?

None of these tasks would be easy, nor would they be completely new to us. Both of our firms had experienced – and therefore understood – the inherent processes of firm expansion, including mergers. K&L, for example, had undergone considerable growth over the past several years, including the doubling in size of our Boston office through a merger. K&L had also successfully expanded to the west coast of the US (Los Angeles and San Francisco), among other regions, through mergers and lateral growth.

Moreover, both NGJ and K&L had marketing and branding programmes in place well in advance of their courtship, devoting thought, time and resources to understand how they were perceived by their clients and prospects, and how best to address them.

By the mid-1990s, NGJ was conducting qualitative and quantitative research with key clients to study the perceptions of the firm in the London market. NGJ’s ‘a better partnership’ tagline, which developed from this work, recognised the progressive and dynamic relationship it had with its clients. The tagline sought to reinforce a central reason why clients hired NGJ lawyers: their ‘commercial thinking’, a deep understanding of the client’s business issues and industry challenges.

At about the same time, K&L was launching its own brand initiative. This effort corresponded to the belief of the firm’s management that expansion was a necessary and welcome requirement for serving K&L’s growing and increasingly sophisticated clientele. Market research was the cornerstone of the programme. An independent research firm commissioned by K&L conducted hundreds of interviews to measure what clients and prospects thought about the firm.

Simultaneously, the firm carried out a series of internal interviews that recorded how its lawyers saw themselves and defined their aspirations.

It was this crucial early work that uncovered the ‘brand’ that informs K&LNG’s promotional work today. Why uncovered? Because, as the firm’s chief marketing officer, I’m of the school that believes a brand cannot be imposed on an organisation or concocted by an advertising firm to reflect the marketing trend of the moment. To be credible and effective, a brand must be authentic and organic to the firm. Like the sculptor who said, when asked how he was able to create such a striking image of his model in stone: “I chipped away the stone until only she remained.” A brand is often what remains when everything else has been chipped away.

In K&L’s case, the firm’s brand team was impressed with the consistent similarities in how both the clients surveyed and its own lawyers described the firm. Both described a legal team that is at its best when the issues are complex, the stakes are high or the odds seemingly insurmountable. That philosophy was captured in the tagline that now accompanies all of the firm’s marketing communications: ‘Challenge us’. It accurately portrayed K&L then and resonates just as strongly for K&LNG today.

Today, these initiatives are the foundation for K&LNG’s brand and positioning strategy, and, notably, the new firm’s inaugural cross-Atlantic advertising campaign.

The ad campaign

In the fall of 2004, following the vote of K&L and NGJ partners that would make Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP a reality as of 1 January 2005, the firms’ marketing teams took on the challenge of creating a marketing-communications scheme for the combined K&LNG. To make the plan a reality, we needed to integrate external and internal marketing literature and other collateral, website content, contact lists, and more.

From the start, we knew that to help build recognition of the new firm and what it stood for, we would mount an integrated marketing-communications programme, which was to contain strong components of media relations, as well as advertising to run in the UK’s major legal media outlets.

The focus of our media-relations initiative was first to promote our firm and certain of our core legal competencies in targeted media. Critical to the success of this programme was a careful collaboration to ensure that these activities were integrated on both sides of the Atlantic. Because K&L had relatively little brand identity in the UK, we would emphasise enhancing our brand there.

To reinforce and augment our media-relations work, we initially envisioned designing an ad campaign specifically for the London/UK market, and limited to UK and EU publishing venues. At first, we thought that the campaign might be confined to a series of ads about our merger, after which we would make a transition to a different campaign altogether. But as we began to explore themes and images for the merger campaign, we quickly realised that the concept we fancied had the potential for much broader reach, both conceptually and geographically.

The best advertising is an artful marriage of thought, words and pictures. With this in mind, we outlined K&LNG’s values and attributes to our UK-based design and advertising team, namely the ‘commercial thinking’ that NGJ’s clients prized and the intelligence and intensity K&L’s clients had grown to expect and value as K&L lawyers tackled the client’s most challenging legal and business issues.

This image would have to work hard. After all, it would have to represent the qualities of our newly combined firm. Soon, an idea of a pivotal image that would be central to, and repeated throughout, the campaign took shape. But we wanted more. The image should be succinct and memorable; sophisticated, but with a sense of humour. This was a tall order.

Our design firm observed that we already had the essence of that image – an ampersand – in our logo. We decided to bring it front and centre. We believed that the qualities associated with the ampersand emblem – on its face a clear symbol of connection – were apt shorthand for the traits we associate with K&LNG. We gave the ampersand a lively three-dimensional form and let it start talking to us.

The result is what we’ve titled our ‘Added Value’ campaign, which we launched in a range of UK-based publications early in 2005, almost immediately after the official date of our combination. We also rolled out the campaign this spring in legal trades in the US.

Connection – collaboration – inclusion

At is most basic, the ampersand icon represents connection, collaboration and inclusion. It is a concise proxy for K&LNG’s collaborative culture, of the underlying promise of added value that informs our service to our clients, of the collaborative way in which we rise to their challenges, and of our ability and willingness to go the extra mile for those whom we counsel and with whom we work.

Good collaborations often result in partnership. The ampersand stands, too, for the value of partnership: initially between K&L and NGJ to create a stronger, international law firm; continually in the teamwork of our lawyers and staff across offices and oceans; and enduringly between our lawyers and clients.

Last, but certainly not least, ‘inclusion’ points to our commitment to a diverse and dynamic workplace. Having gender and ethnic diversity in the firm promotes a perspective that helps us better address the complexity of the environments in which our clients do business. We’re proud of the fact K&L led the US legal community by appointing (in 2003) the first management-committee-level chief diversity officer in a law firm.

It has legs?

Viewed and used over time – yet another reason for employing a consistent predominant image – the ampersand takes on a subtly anthropomorphic quality that we hope will steadily enhance the power of the campaign. We hope, too, that the lightheartedness of the image in its various iterations brings a smile, and reveals another side of our firm and our people: that while we take our work very seriously, we try to see the humour in ourselves. Lastly, as media professionals are wont to say, the ampersand has ‘legs’. The approach lends itself to almost limitless creative interpretations and to a range of applications.

As the campaign continues its roll-out, we’re now using the ‘added value’ concept and ampersand icon in other ways besides advertising. We’ve brought it into conference announcements, a brochure for our annual retreat for partners, and a direct-mail piece announcing the move of one of K&LNG’s offices. Integrating the look and feel of marketing communications keeps the ampersand, its message and, we hope, K&LNG, top of mind. The versatility of the design not only creates new opportunities to reinforce our brand, it also allows us to generate much of the collateral material internally – an additional benefit that helps us control costs.

Because most of the ads conceived to date were developed first with a UK audience in mind, we carefully review images, and particularly text, to determine whether they’ll work equally well across the Atlantic. So far, no major issues have surfaced. In most cases, we’ve found that all that is required is changing the spelling of certain words (substituting the US-English ‘organization’ for the UK-English ‘organisation,’ for example, or turning ‘programme’ into ‘program’). Only occasionally have we encountered problems. Once, we found that a song and title that a US marketer thought was an apt message for our client audience turned out to be the unofficial anthem for a UK soccer team. Needless to say, we reconsidered that one.

Conceptualising and implementing our ad and media campaigns have been rewarding experiences. During this process, our combining firms were required to examine seriously our joint defining and distinguishing features.

We had an ideal platform from which to better understand three critical cultures: our respective firms, clients and countries. Although we have not yet achieved all our goals, we believe we’ve created a successful framework for building and reinforcing our brand internationally.

Clara Boza is chief marketing officer for Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP (K&LNG). She can be contacted at cboza@klng.com