By John Doerr and Mike Schultz

Will it Go Round in Circles?

There you are, sitting in a nice leather chair in your firm's board room. The rest of the senior management team is amassing for the meeting you've been putting off for years: getting serious about growing the firm. Yes, you've met about the firm's marketing and branding strategy before, but this time the mood is different: serious, focused...determined.

So the meeting begins and you start talking about your branding and marketing strategy. Hours later (having taken no breaks, of course) the management team is still sparring about your firm's tagline, debating whether the logo looks 'modern' but still 'classy', arguing where you should place a series of ads so you can increase your brand recognition. PR campaigns are planned. Decisions are made, and off the firm goes towards unstoppable growth and profits.

Yet, nine months later, when you gather to have the same meeting all over again, you wonder: Why didn't the ads and the PR work? Why have the campaigns lost steam in recent months? What can we do that really will make a difference?

If this story sounds familiar, we apologize for the pain the retelling might have caused you. We also apologize for the (probably significant) amount of money you spent and likely wasted on branding campaigns that, while they may have made you feel good, didn't get you much leverage in terms of revenue and profit growth for your firm.

Most professional services firms, at one point or another, engage serious discussions and initiatives for growing the firm - and these discussions often center around "marketing" or "branding."

However, as most professional services firms are headed by experts in their field (e.g. lawyers run law firms, technologists run technology service firms, etc.) and are not lifelong managers or marketers, they head down this ill-advised branding path.

Why? Because your competitors do it. Because this is what many marketing 'consultants' say to do. It's also an easy target to tackle: you can write press releases; you can critique your new logo and ad strategy; you can brainstorm new taglines until you are blue in the face. Unfortunately, none of these 'marketing' activities are central to service firm growth.

Marketing and branding are, indeed, central to service firm growth. However, what you think you should be doing for marketing and branding, and what you really should be doing, may be quite different. To understand why, we must step back and look at the underlying goals of branding.

Goals of Branding

While the high priests of branding would like you to think there is some secret, difficult to comprehend goal of branding, there isn't. It's really quite simple and can be distilled into the following:

1. Recognize: Your target customers must recognize you and be aware of what you do.
2. Articulate: They need to be able to articulate what you do.
3. Memorize: When they need your service, your company should be the first option they think of.
4. Prefer: Your target customers should prefer to use your service versus all other options available to them.

Speaking of high priests, a man once came before the venerable Rabbi Hillel and asked of him, "Please teach me all of the Torah while I stand on one foot." Hillel replied to him, "What is hateful to you, do not do to any person. That is the whole Torah - all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it!"

Nearly as simple as the Torah, then, branding is about recognition (or awareness), articulation, memorization, and preference - all the rest is commentary. The only problem is, the commentary on branding - if you read the commentary preached by most advertising and PR-based branding gurus - will empty your bank accounts and drain your time without providing your firm the growth you are aiming for!

Much of this centers on a matter of perspective: firm vs. client. Firms sit around thinking about how they want to brand and market their services (from the firm's perspective) when they should be focusing on how clients perceive and buy professional services (from the client's perspective). If you understand how people buy professional services, it might lead you to new conclusions on what your marketing and branding activities should be.

Understand the Professional Services Buyer

Sophisticated buyers of professional services don't usually care what your brochure, your advertisement, or your logo look like. It simply doesn't matter to them that much. Sure, your marketing materials need to reflect the nature of your firm's work, and the level of quality of your services, but in general they simply need to be good enough, reflect well on you, and facilitate the buying process.

What most buyers of professional services want to know that will make a difference in their decision to buy or not is:

• How good are you at your expertise? If you're a CPA firm, are you a really good one? Are you technically competent and, at the same time, knowledgeable about my business and passionate about my success?
  
  
• Can I depend on you? If you say you are going to do something, what will lead me to believe that you will actually do it? Conversely, will you do something that will reflect poorly on me to my colleagues and clients?
  
  
• Does your firm offer services that fit my needs? If you're an architectural firm and I am a school department, do you have deep and current knowledge about building schools?
  
  
• How easy and convenient is it to work with your firm? If you're a technology consulting firm, can I get a hold of you when I need you? Is your accounts receivable department easy to work with? Do you have a local office to work with me if I need you?
  
  
• Do I like you? If you're a law firm, do I feel comfortable having conversations with your legal staff? Does your firm's culture and personality fit mine? If I have to spend a lot of time with you, will it be enjoyable (or at least bearable)?

If, indeed, these are the major buying influences for professional services, why do so many so-called marketing strategy discussions focus on what your logo should look like? From a will-it-generate-revenue perspective, does it really matter how many people see your ad? It might matter to the egos of the people at the firm, but not very often to its long-term revenue generation success.

The Most Powerful Branding of All

So, if branding is our task in a professional services firm, what do we do? Assuming the underlying goals are to generate awareness, understanding, and preference:

If you're shooting for brand recognition, what do you think a potential client will remember more: seeing your ad in a trade publication many times or hearing a great presentation from you that gave them a sense of your personality, expertise, style, and competence?

If brand articulation is your goal, do you think people will remember your snappy tagline, or will people remember the articles you wrote that helped them work through a specific problem they were struggling with?

If brand memorization is your goal, what are you doing to keep your message constantly in front of current and prospective buyers?

If brand preference is your goal, what do you think is more powerful: all the marketing communications you can aim at them over the course of two years, or one actual and very positive experience of what it's like working with you?

Of course, it's the latter in each of the above that makes the strongest and most lasting brand impressions. Instead of focusing on your logo and your brochure, then, focus on improving the ability of your professional staff to provide value, both with their clients and in the marketing and selling process.

The most powerful branding of all are the impressions your professionals can make one-by-one on individual clients and prospects. The client interactions they lead, the work product they deliver, the presentations they give, the articles they write, and the value they provide in every contact with the world outside the firm is more important from a branding perspective than any marketing-based initiative you can implement.

So focus on the people at your firm as the secret weapon for your branding. Help them be better across-the-board tomorrow than they are today. Give them more opportunities to connect with the marketplace. Improve your firm's client satisfaction and loyalty by improving the value you provide to your clients. Develop the passion, enthusiasm, and motivation of the professionals at your firm to create a vibrant culture of client satisfaction.

Strive to make even the smallest, most incremental gains in the overall excellence of your firm. Then communicate that excellence to the market in ways that create actual value for clients and prospects. For when the market sees, not your logo and snappy tagline, but your passion, excellence, and dedication to their success, you'll be executing the most powerful branding of all.