Branding as an essential part of business development

From simply the department that printed new letterhead, a legal marketing team is now responsible for creating ‘brands’ that stand out in a crowd and the profession is growing up to the realisation that marketing has a fundamental role to play in the ethos, growth and external perception of a firm. Martin Street the marketing director at Boyds Solicitors assesses the opportunities for law firm marketing and why it has become such an important feature of the competitive environment.

The in-house marketing function of professional services firms didn’t really exist 20 years ago, and has come a long way since then. Now, the great strides taken by legal firms means we have arrived at a point where the ‘marketing function’ is becoming a key driver behind business development.

Historically, accounting and legal services have been governed by strict codes of ethics and professional conduct. Professional services were different and enjoyed increasing prosperity in what most outsiders regarded as a highly protected environment.

This protection and certainty of the market has, however, changed dramatically since the late 1970's and 1980's. Firstly, the ethical restrictions that prohibited certain forms of promotional and communication activity have been steadily lifted. Secondly, the assurance of a steady stream of clients walking through the door without any prompting, has slowly eroded. The professions now have to be as competitive as any other commercial business when it comes to winning and retaining clients – the days of too much work and not enough lawyers to do it is most definitely a thing of the past

There are still guidelines in place to govern promotional activities among law firms. For instance, lawyers cannot directly solicit competitors’ clients, criticise their competitors or telemarket prospects following a direct mail campaign. However, following legislative changes, the Law Society has relaxed its previous restrictions, allowing legal firms to advertise their services.

Law firms now regularly engage in PR-led strategies to heighten their profiles, advertise, have websites and produce expensively manufactured brochures. The tide has turned and professional service practitioners have entered the marketing arena promoting their services to the general public.

With this, the central marketing tactics to first understand and then reach your market, which consist of research, product (service) placement and people, have also evolved significantly; with legal marketers paying more attention to what their markets want rather then just selling clients what is available and then seeking differentiation.

However, whereas traditionally manufactured products can be differentiated by design, packaging or by price, professional services are innately difficult to differentiate because of the similarity of many of the services and the restrictive professional standards, regulating their execution. As a consequence, there has been a trend for legal services to become better tuned, more targeted and client focused and then branded with specific recognisable identities.

Fundamental to this greater brand awareness, is the realisation that a firm’s image no longer revolves around individuals, as it used to traditionally. Instead, there is an understanding that there is now a collective responsibility for all lawyers to deliver services in a particular corporate style. Simply put, the strength behind a brand is the values that it asserts; and within the legal profession these values must be borne out of substance.

Recent independent research commissioned in Scotland looked at how and why businesses choose professional services. Over a hundred senior company directors who had used legal services were interviewed and asked to give the factors for choosing a firm scores out of ten. The findings showed that potential business clients are less impressed by a big name and instead prefer going back to basics, favouring the reassurances that are behind the name such as quick responses to queries.

Against this sort of background, the traditional ‘ivory tower’ professional services must be prepared to make a dynamic response if they are to remain commercially viable. For many, this will be achieved by becoming more client-focused and by promoting this as a business strength.

However, a word of warning. This type of marketing activity only works if it genuinely drives fundamental changes to the development of the firm across the board and is consistently delivered by everyone in the firm thereafter. Equally, the role of the legal marketer is not to impose a brand but to identify and build on a firm’s existing strengths and values adapting the approach as these evolve in the future.

For Boyds, a greater understanding of our market and its perceptions of the firm have led to an internal restructuring in order to open up the services we provide. We have set out to build our business and operational strategy in a manner that more closely matches that of our commercial clients, ensuring that our services are relevant, meeting client demands and standards of excellence. An extensive re-branding campaign then ensured that our public face and persona more closely reflected the strengths of the business.

For us, as a medium sized independent, it has been vital to be perceived as an integral part of a client’s organisation - by ‘adding value’ to their enterprise and by seeking as many profitable cross-selling opportunities within the organisation. Marketing has become one of these added value resources.

Some firms have ritually viewed the marketing function as less important as it was sometimes perceived as eating-up resources without providing an obvious revenue stream. But this is set to change, as marketing becomes integral to business development. With greater appreciation, who’s to say that marketing expertise shouldn’t be offered as part of the firm’s overall business consultation? What company trying to avoid insolvency, or a start-up wouldn’t welcome friendly marketing advice from the in-house expert of his trusted lawyers?

By bringing in a greater understanding of branding issues, marketers are genuinely contributing to the bottom-line and it is not beyond the imagination to even see them as fee-earners in the future.

Martin Street is the marketing director of Boyds Solicitors, Glasgow & Edinburgh. He can be contacted at mstreet@boydslaw.com .