Article 3:

Why "Branded" Law Firms Will Steal Your Clients

Most law firms spend very little time worrying about branding. Many think that with a logo, letterhead, and business cards, they've completed their brand image. However, a brand is bigger than a few symbols. Your brand is your firm's promise. By promoting your firm in a consistent and meaningful way, you establish your promise as well as an expectation of your services that helps build awareness, loyalty, and trust.

To successfully establish your brand, all attorneys and staff must work together as faithful representatives of the brand. They must be consistent in how they present the brand to each other, as well as to clients. A brand is built over time as the firm integrates its brand strategy into everything it does.

Start by putting together a brand guidebook that defines the following characteristics of your firm:

• Your Promise

  The Brand Promise is the single most important thing that the firm promises to deliver to its clients on a consistent basis. To define your brand promise, consider what clients, staff, and partners should expect from every interaction with your firm. You should weigh every business decision against this promise to be sure that it fully reflects the promise, or, at the very least, it does not contradict the promise

• Your Qualities

  Brand Qualities illustrate what your firm wants its brand to be known for. Think about specific qualities you want your prospective and current clients, staff, and partners to use to describe your practice. You come up with 4-6 qualities. For example, if your firm represents larger corporations your qualities may include professionalism, experience, dependability, competence and authority. If you represent individuals in a high volume practice your qualities may include efficiency, friendless, fairness, timeliness and value.

• Your Position

  The Brand Position describes what your firm does and for whom, what your unique value is (how a client benefits from working with you), and what are the key difference between you and your competition. Once you've come up with your brand position, put it in words and add it to your brand guidebook.

• Brand Connections

  Brand Connections are the specific physical objects that make up the brand. This will include your firm name, logo, colors, taglines, fonts, graphics, etc. Your brand connections must reflect your brand promise, all of the brand qualities you identified, and support your brand positioning statement.

• Brand Story

  The Brand Story illustrates your firm's history, along with how the history adds value and credibility to the brand. It also usually includes a summary of your services.

Once you've developed and defined your brand, you must begin building the brand with staff, clients, prospective clients, partners, etc. through consistent execution. Repetition is the key to the success of the branding process.

Use a client satisfaction poll at least once a year to help you validate where you're at in the eyes of your clients, partners, and staff and what improvements you need to make to better reflect the brand strategy you're following!