Case study: Perfect harmony

Maintaining consistency in branding 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 message was being communicated to its clients, external agencies and lawyers.

By David Sanders, director of marketing, Maclay Murray & Spens LLP

People come to legal marketing from many different backgrounds. My own route was through sales. For three years before I joined my first law 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 when I started I remember 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; 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 identical, word-for-word, 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 bought their products to the consumer – including the behaviours of the salesforce. That consistency in presentation was enormously powerful. Combined with superb training and fantastic products, it added up to market leadership for most elements of our product range.

Some of you may be wondering what relevance medical devices have to your own work in the legal sector. First, 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 we sometimes 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 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 we took this lesson on board at our firm by ensuring the branding we came up with had some relevance to how our clients already perceived the firm – rather than trying to pretend the re-branded firm was now something entirely new. There was ambition and stretch in what we did, of course, but there also had to be the credibility that 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 is very important for a firm to do something entirely different to what we’ve done if it is re-branding. Create something that reflects the unique character of your firm, and which projects the firm’s personality and culture to its client base and targets.

The re-brand programme

Market positioning

At Maclay Murray & Spens, the process of re-branding started around two-and-a-half years ago. At that point, the firm was embarking on a London merger and was approximately one year away from conversion to LLP. We were offered a golden opportunity to scrap everything and start again. We looked at Clementi, and 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 read all of our materials and made the point we were very bullish in our promotional copy, had a clear expansionist strategy and were doing great work, but we were understated about all of this 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 that 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 point 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, and that’s an important decision because, in the search for consistency, many firms employ just 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 that consistency will come with a compromise on some aspects of the application and creativity. What I’m looking for is for 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 we have consistency in our branding while retaining creative impact, however, 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 all 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 is that we first told each of our agencies to forget we were lawyers and to offer us solutions that 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 (Figure 1) – 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 the job much more nerve-wracking to go down that route, but when something new then 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 that we tried to keep to a minimum. In that first phase we also 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 created these first items based on templates, which we then introduced and incorporated within our branding guidelines, a booklet that defines in detail how each of these items
should appear. Then we put the whole lot out there, knowing we had done our research, knowing that it should all work, and with our fingers tightly crossed.

The results were very satisfying. Website visits quadrupled in the first six months. More importantly, we could see peaks that correlated to our promotional activity, indicating those activities were being noticed and reacted to. The website was also placed 16th in the UK in the Intendance annual survey, but first for design. In the latest of these surveys we have moved to third overall, third for marketing effectiveness, and we are now fourth for design. Not bad for a firm currently at 49th by turnover and with a marketing department of eight people. Just 18 months after the launch we won the Managing Partners Forum (MPF) ‘European Best Brand in Practice’ award in 2006. This year we are shortlisted for both the ‘Best Brand in Practice’ and ‘Best Marketing Campaign’ categories in these awards. Having developed these initial templates, and by being brave enough to stick to them, the roll-out became easy. Evolution was simply a case of saying to our agencies: ‘Use your creativity to take this forward, but stay within the guidelines’.

People power

Lawyers and other staff have a further powerful role in this process – perhaps the most important of all in making branding consistent. They have to live the brand values and deliver on the brand promise. It is very important to have a brand and an implementation process that can inspire and positively affect 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 it ourselves – before clearing our final proposal through chief executive Magnus Swanson.

The second stage – in which we involved everybody in the firm – was perhaps the most important (and rewarding) part of the process. This concerns how we have used the branding as an internal benchmark for our behaviours. Working with Robin Shuker of consultancy Brands in Action, we 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 itself, so everybody has a role – from the receptionist, to the mailman, to the associate, right up to the senior partner. As a consequence, these people all appear in our literature and on our website. Our graphics are photographs of our real 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.

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

This article was originally published in the April/May 2007 issue of Legal Marketing.