What is the role of B2B branding? How is it different from sales and marketing? Why should B2B enterprises be adopting purpose-driven brand strategies? What benefits will they accrue by adapting themselves to the changing requirements of the Purpose Economy?
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Tag: Law Firm
Law Firm Branding Project: Launching with Impact
A law firm branding project isn’t just about the strategy or the creative – it’s about getting the law firm ready, aligned, and joined together behind the change. A new brand is an opportunity to build excitement and momentum around the future of your law firm. And the launch plays a large role in this.
But launching a global law firm brand and figuring out how you are going to share it with the people who matter to your business is no small task.
Here are some tips for launching your new brand:
Although pushing your new website live is often the symbol of a new launch, there’s a lot of things to consider that can create energy and excitement, and generate momentum before and after.
In fact, without any prior knowledge, a lot of people within your firm might consider branding as ‘marketing fluff’ – having nothing to do with what they do or care about. So a successful launch needs to convince them otherwise. Even if partners haven’t been involved with the project, the launch needs to validate the time, money and energy spent on the branding project. Prior to launch, it’s critical to lay the groundwork that will prepare internal audiences for what’s to come.
This is an opportunity to bring everyone together and rally behind the new brand. For a global law firm, it’s especially important for people across offices to see that everyone is engaged and celebrating the new brand.
Every law firm and its brand are different and your launch tactics should be guided by your brand strategy. When you are ready to press ‘go,’ here are some general tactics to consider:
- Save the dates: build anticipation and excitement around the launch
- A giveaway: gives people something that symbolizes the new brand.
- A retreat: gets people aligned and rallied behind the brand.
- A task force and/or brand ambassadors: facilitate and support training in each global office.
- A Brand Book & or Brand Video: a rallying cry that brings everything together in an emotive and impactful way.
- Internal and external newsletters: discuss what the change means and where the new brand will take the business.
- A letter to clients: explains the new launch and what it means specifically for them.
- Documentation and social sharing on launch day: spreads excitement across offices.
- Brand central: allows people in each global office to go and pull down new collateral.
- A brand manager: maintains momentum and keeps the brand on track and time, making sure resources are being allocated correctly.
Creating momentum around a launch is one thing. Maintaining momentum and keeping the brand impactful is another. When a brand is launched with success, it is able to maintain the momentum it needs to keep doing the work it needs to do for your business – positioning it to be competitive, grow, and thrive.
Check out how our latest law firm branding project for our client, BAL, created a brand that positioned their law firm to be a major player in the corporate immigration market, and launched that brand with success.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco design and brand strategy agency.
The Human Dimension of Law Firm Branding
Law firm branding is not easy. I find it ironic that many of the most people-driven enterprises in our economy – law firms, architecture, consulting, and engineering firms – are often the most superficial with branding.
For most professional service firms, “branding” is only about logos and color palettes. It seems branding’s only goal is to project a serious, professional, and trustworthy identity.
Unfortunately, this limited view of branding leads most professional service firms to the same bland destination.
Indeed, the Internet is littered with the drab, me-too, institutional websites of professional service firms. Flipping from site to site, one has a hard time distinguishing one firm from another. Across an industry, you’ll find the same, tired and predictable rational presentations of facts about each firm. In almost all cases, there are strikingly similar, and weirdly unnatural, photos of executives posed in front of wood paneling.
Does this sound like your professional service brand? If so, it’s really time to shift your view of what branding is capable of doing, and what a more humanly meaningful brand can do for your partners and your firm.
Challenged firms need a new approach
If your firm is struggling to attract new business, finding it hard to retain clients, losing the best recruits to other firms and languishing in the me-too land of professional services branding, its time a for a dose of human emotion in your workplace and in the marketplace.
Human emotion? Well, this is not about presenting happy, smiling faces or tear-jerking situations. Rather, it is about connecting in a more meaningful way with emotional human beings. The emotions and feelings I am talking about – which have the potential to propel your firm forward in a distinct way – are not frivolous or mercenary. They are relevant, engaging and accessible feelings that are totally natural to what your firm does, and what it does for people.
Creating a presence that resonates emotionally
For decades, branding has skirted around the fact that all rational decisions – from which mayonnaise jar to pick up off the shelf, to which firm to appoint – occur within a swirl of emotions. Apart from the emotions which an individual naturally brings to the moment (feeling in love, or feeling mad about being passed up for a promotion), there are also emotions in play that are introduced when an individual thinks about a particular brand.
These emotions – and the feelings they trigger – are either neutral, negative, or positive. Naturally, no brand intentionally strives for a neutral or negative emotional aura. But, what is strange is that few professional service brands strive for a uniquely positive emotional aura. This is particularly strange because of the human nature of the work professional service firms perform.
Emotive branding elevates professional service firms
We’ve found a way to bring professional service brands new meaning and relevance. We start by thinking of the best way for your clients, prospects and recruits to feel about your firm. We then guide you on how to update your processes, policies and practices so they better evoke these feelings. We create tools that get your partners and support staff to understand the value of emotional differentiation (both for the firm and individually). We help you revamp your firm’s communications, marrying your new emotional aura to your current rational presentation (the look and feel, the story you tell, and the voice you use).
Use emotions to differentiate in profoundly meaningful ways
Strive to make each experience people have with your firm more emotionally involving. Do it in specific, own-able ways that positively predispose them to act in your firm’s best interests. Create a distinctively appealing presence for your firm that stands apart from the crowd. Reach out using human emotion to make your rational story more compelling.
After all, people will decide based on how they feel about your firm’s brand. Why not do all you can to influence how they feel?
To see examples of B2B brand strategy and law firm branding examples please visit our client page.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.