In response to just how popular last week’s post ‘Marketing Your Firm’ (https://lntvinsight.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/marketing-your-firm/) proved to be, we thought we’d follow it up with another further brief extract from that same forthcoming programme ‘Marketing your Firm’ in the Practice Management & Compliance channel. This time the extract comes from our interview with Ian Stephens, Managing Partner of Saffron Brand Consultants, who talked to us about branding (http://saffron-consultants.com/approach/ian-stephens/)
Interviewer: Talk us through how you go about creating a brand.
Ian Stephens: Well, at the heart of a brand process there are four steps, the first one is what we call discover, so that’s about market research, both understanding what your clients might want and do want. Understanding who you are, what you do, how you do it. So it’s basically the market research end of things. Second step is what we call define, so working out from all those possible things what actually is your strategy. So you define your brand strategy, what message you want to take out to the world. The third stage is design, and that doesn’t only mean visual identity, it means how do we design the service, the experience that we want our clients to have of this service? And then the last one, often the most difficult, is deploy, so how do we make that all happen in the real world as opposed to the PowerPoint presentations we’ve been working with up until now. So a four step process which can be done over weeks or months or even years, but at the heart of it you’re still following that four point process.
Interviewer: So what do you need to think about when assessing the market in which you operate and your role within it?
Ian Stephens: Well, the legal market is a very big and diverse and global market, so there are lots places to be in that market. So part of the research and the defined stage is very important to choose your territory, to choose your story. And there are three, there are three, if you like, overlapping circles, one is what do your clients need, because they’re actually going to pay for something they need, not just what you think they need, so ask them. Those things may be what you think they are, they may be something else. The second thing is what are you good at, and that’s not such a stupid question because you can’t be great at everything and there might be, for whatever reason, you’re particularly entrepreneurial or you’re particularly good at an area of law, you’re particularly good at a type of situation. And then the last one is what can other people do less well than you? And you’re not looking for something unique that nobody else can touch, but you’re looking for emphasis, so you’re trying to find things that clients genuinely do need and that you are, to some extent incredibly able to deliver, and then ideally something that not very many other people can do. Get all those three right and then you start to have a proposition as we might call it, that is quite valuable.
Interviewer: And once you’ve settled on your brand, how do you go about managing it?
Ian Stephens: Well, this is the really tough bit because, actually, defining a story is not so complicated as actually making that real, because a law firm of even 50 people, you’ve got 50 personalities to deal with, 50 human beings to deal with, a law firm of 10,000 people, you multiple that so many times. And so the big challenge in implementing your strategy is to actually deploy it with ruthless precision across all the touchpoints of what we call the client journey, how you manage that client experience at every single touchpoint so that it’s in line with your brand values, and that where things are not in line with those brand values you have to try to take steps to correct them.
LNTV insight 