If you could light a Bunsen burner under a great brand and distill it down to its most basic substance, you’d be left with the brand’s most valuable asset — its name. Even after other critical elements have evaporated away, a brand’s name still packs a punch. If American Express, IBM, or Coca-Cola were to shut down their businesses today (assuming nothing had tainted their reputations), these brands could be revived a few years from now and still be formidable contenders in their categories. Such is the power of the brand name.

More and more professional services companies are recognizing that their firm name can help them stand out in a competitive environment and contribute to long-term customer loyalty. Over the past five decades a whole industry has emerged to help entrepreneurs and corporations name their businesses and products. Larger naming firms employ linguists and proprietary computer programs to develop hundreds or thousands of potential names and name fragments (called morphemes). Smaller firms rely on their experience, wit, and brainstorming techniques to produce options for their clients. Both approaches can produce excellent names. And very poor names, too.

In this post, we take a closer look at firm names — the good and the bad. Names can be broken into five categories:

1. Coined
2. Descriptive
3. Abstract
4. Acronyms
5. Founder/Partner names

Let’s dive into each.

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1. Coined Names

A few years ago, names coined from Greek and Latin roots were all the rage, and they still pop up with some regularity today. From Accenture to Zillow, coined names are imbued with latent meaning and are easy to trademark. Trouble is, these names have little meaning to ordinary people who are unfamiliar with classical languages — and they can sometimes be bland and hard to remember. ArcelorMittal and Amedisys don’t exactly roll of the tongue, do they?

2. Descriptive Names

Many names are descriptive of their services. Computer Associates, General Mills, Pre-Paid Legal Services are examples of business whose names reflect what they do. On the upside, people will understand what these businesses do. On the downside, these names can be very generic, making them difficult to trademark. Generic names tend to make poor long-term brand names because they have little traction in our minds. And as companies evolve, these names don’t offer much flexibility.

3. Abstract Names

Other names are pure abstractions, like Amazon, Alphabet, Google, and Karhoo. While many of these are real words, they have little obvious connection to their businesses. Their value comes from their quirkiness, not their connotations. What these abstract names lack in seriousness they more than make up for in the attention they command. They are difficult to forget. There is a danger with these names, however — they have the potential to be perceived as unprofessional, eccentric, or silly.

4. Acronyms

Another popular choice are acronyms — IBM, CVS, and CBS are well-known examples. In almost every case, the name started as something else (a string of founders’ names or a descriptive name) and became condensed over time. Clients, for instance, have a knack for abbreviating long vendor names. The problems with acronyms, however, are legion: they are usually impossible to trademark, they have no meaning or emotional appeal, and they are easily transposed and confused with similar-sounding company names.

5. Founders’ or Partners’ Names

Many companies, particularly in the professional services, are named for their founders or partners (and in larger firms, these names can be a real mouthful). This tradition, which goes back for centuries, makes sense in an industry in which personal connections are all-important. The long-term implications, however, can be problematic. When a named principal dies or leaves the firm, those personal connections are lost. In many cases, as these companies evolve over time, so do their names — as new partners replace old. These transformations can create confusion in the marketplace and makes it difficult to establish a widely known brand name.

This tradition of naming companies for their principals is unlikely to go away any time soon. But firms with an eye to the future may want to choose a name with better long-term branding prospects — one that is short, differentiated from competitors, and unlikely to metamorphose over time. You could select a single distinctive-sounding founder’s name, for instance, and stick with it for the long haul.

Choosing a Good Firm Name

Most experts agree that choosing a good name is important. A name encapsulates all of the content — intellectual and emotional — that people associate with a product or service. Some names make this process of association easier than others. With all of the challenges business owners face, it makes sense to use every advantage at their disposal.

So what’s the right name for your firm? Well, that depends on a variety of factors. Unless you are a startup, your current name carries at least some — and perhaps considerable — equity from its years of use. Adopting a new name at an established firm is no small decision.

But if you are in a highly competitive market with little differentiation among firms, a distinctive name could give you a leg up. In fact, there are a number of reasons you might want to break with the past and introduce a new firm name:

• Your name is easily confused with a competitor
• Your name is difficult to remember, spell, or pronounce
• You are looking for a way to differentiate your firm
• Your name or brand feels stale and old
• Named partners have retired or left the firm
• Your firm is trying to recover from a PR disaster
• You are undergoing a major rebrand or shift in strategic direction

If are considering a new moniker for your organization, you’ll want to choose one that will stand the test of time. Remember, your name has a great deal of potential. It’s an opportunity to establish new associations and expectations as your firm takes on the future.

6 Ways Your Name Can Build Your Brand

1. Differentiate you; contrast you against competitors
2. Aid recall of your brand name
3. Engage your audience
4. Support your positioning
5. Establish your business’ personality
6. Stand for something more universal than your product or service

Read Other Posts in This Series:

• Elements of a Successful Brand 1: Brand Positioning
• Elements of a Successful Brand 2: The Tagline
• Elements of a Successful Brand 3: Personality
• Elements of a Successful Brand 4: Brand Promise
• Elements of a Successful Brand 5: The Name
• Elements of a Successful Brand 6: The Logo
• Elements of a Successful Brand 7: Color
• Elements of a Successful Brand 8: Messaging
• Elements of a Successful Brand 9: Imagery

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The post Elements of a Successful Brand 5: The Name appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

On the contrary, too many new management consulting firms’ brandings efforts are hasty and unclear. Branding is tough, after all, and a learning curve is to be expected. But a murky brand can put you at a competitive disadvantage right from the start.

The need for thoughtful attention to branding doesn’t end once a firm is established, either. As your services evolve and your marketplace changes, you must continually reassess your branding to ensure that it is aligned with your goals and the realities of your industry.

Otherwise, you may lose competitive ground, while sowing confusion about who you really are and what you really do. But like I said before, branding is tough, even for the most successful firms.

Even if you once built a great brand, you might not know how to rebrand in a transformed marketplace. So here are 7 branding ideas that can you help you shape your brand the right way.

1. Understand your field’s unique challenges.

Branding a consulting practice is significantly different from branding many other types of professional services. It has its own opportunities and its own challenges.

Chief among the challenges is the fact that many of your audiences may not know very much about what you do – at least not by default. Most people have some idea of what a law firm or accounting firm does. But management consultants often offer very different sorts of services, and there is less general cultural awareness of what those services consist of.

As a result, firms need to spend more on marketing and business development. In fact, management consulting firms tend to spend a higher percentage of revenue on marketing than firms in other professional services industries, like accounting and AEC. Since you’re typically selling expertise and advice, it’s essential that you help your audiences understand exactly what kind of advice and expertise you offer.

2. Remember what makes up your brand.

It’s hard to fine-tune your brand if you don’t know what it is in the first place. Whenever you brand or rebrand a business, you must remember that your brand isn’t something vague or imprecise. In fact, it’s so specific and quantifiable that you can express it as an equation:

Brand = reputation x visibility

A positive reputation for your management consulting firm can take two forms. People might regard you generally as a “great firm,” or people might know you for your expertise.

Expertise-driven reputation is a particular asset, since it connects directly to your service offerings. One of your audiences’ biggest questions is always going to be, “What do you do?” A reputation for expertise helps you answer those questions clearly.

Your reputation for a specific type of expertise also has another advantage. A recent study in the accounting industry shows that it dramatically increases the likelihood of receiving an actual referral.

3. Experts have an advantage.

Speaking of expertise…
When it comes to boosting your brand, there is simply nothing like having individual Visible Experts^® on your team. Research shows that firms with Visible Experts build greater visibility and command higher rates. Indeed, the presence of high-visibility experts drives success for the whole firm.

New business development is a particularly high priority for management consulting firms, since by the nature of the work, many clients are not repeat engagements. Visible Experts help generate more leads and cement your credibility in the marketplace, making it easier to close more sales and grow.

4. Your brand should be based on reality.

It’s not uncommon for people to develop grand visions for their brands, but it’s important to make sure your branding is rooted in reality.

What do I mean by “reality”? Start with in-depth research on your clients, prospects, and influencers in your industry. Then move on to study your competition as well.

The tough fact is that you are the worst judge of your own brand. It’s almost a universal rule – most of us are simply too close to our brands to view them objectively. That’s why it’s so important to base your branding decisions on empirical evidence rather than opinions. This way, you can create a brand that truly serves the needs of your business.

5. Position your brand based on real differentiators.

For management consulting firms, research is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only does it help you ground your branding in the reality of the marketplace, it helps you identify or find new and relevant differentiators that will set your firm apart from the rest of the pack.

In the course of your research, ask questions like:

• What issues are your clients facing today?
• What are they talking about?
• What do your competitors specialize in?
• Are there areas of unmet need in your marketplace?

The answers to these questions will help you identify differentiators on which to build your new brand.

Some of these potential differentiators may be qualities that you already hold, but need to start emphasizing in your marketing. Others may be opportunities – areas where you can decide to be different. You may find, for example, that there is an opportunity to specialize in an unfilled niche or provide services through a novel business model.

Either way, your differentiators must pass three tests. They must be 1) true, 2) relevant to your target audience, and 3) provable. If you can prove to clients that you are different in a way that helps meet their needs, you’ll be positioned for success.

6. Reflect your brand positioning in all of your communications tools and all of your educational content.

It should be clear by now that a brand is much more than a logo and a tagline. It’s the soul of your firm, and in order to do its work, it needs to suffuse everything you do – particularly your public messaging and educational content.

Think about the various channels through which you communicate with and educate audiences. These might include:

• Website
• Marketing collateral
• Pitch decks
• Proposals
• Newsletters
• Blog

Every single one of these marketing channels needs to be fundamentally aligned with your branding ideas. You need to talk about your firm in a consistent way – ideally guided by well-crafted branding guidelines. Otherwise, your message will become muddled and audiences will grow confused about who you are and what you’re trying to say.

7. Build the visibility of your brand in multiple channels over time.

You might announce a new brand in the course of an hour – but real results take time. Your brand will need to work in the marketplace organically and across many channels, which is to say that people will have to encounter it through your website, social media, and their general experience of you.

To drive this process and reinforce your expertise, you can use a variety of tools. Search engine optimization can help you use targeted keywords to draw visitors to your website. Social media is a great way to engage directly with audiences and communicate in a way that aligns with your brand.

Not all brand-driven communications are online, either. Through public speaking, articles, and seminars, you can help build visibility for your expertise and cement your brand.

Ultimately, all seven of these branding ideas work together and reinforce each other for accumulated effects – visibility and growth. Through strategic and deliberate branding, you can help your firm stand apart and get ahead.

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Like all good marketing initiatives, brand tracking should start with a fundamental understanding of your buyers. Our research shows that, while asking a friend or colleague for a recommendation remains—barely—the top way businesses search for a new professional services firm, this approach is being overtaken by digital methods such as web search, and reading online articles/blog posts.

As digital communications continue their steady rise in prominence, it’s imperative to understand how your target audience searches for insights and expertise to address their business problems.

Brand Tracking Tools

Once you understand your buyers’ search channels you can choose the appropriate tools to monitor your brand.

Today, tracking your professional services firm’s online brand is more important than ever. And while the latest marketing technology can often be overwhelming, marketing professionals may already have many of the tools they need to track their digital brand over time.

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking is the process of measuring changes in brand perception over time. It quantifies a return on brand investment and supports brand strategy decisions.

With enough data and the right tools, you can measure this perception almost instantly. For example, consumer brands with large social followings can track their brands in real-time using social listening tools to measure what is being said about their brand, campaign, competitors, and product or service. Unfortunately, most professional services firms don’t have a large enough social following to make this kind of real-time brand tracking practical.

But that doesn’t mean professional services firms can’t utilize brand tracking.

Brand tracking in the B2B space boils down to two main approaches:

1. Gathering/monitoring experiential feedback
2. Surveying your buyers

Both approaches are critically important. Firms that deploy both of these techniques are far more likely to achieve superior results from their brand tracking efforts.

Gathering and Monitoring Experiential Feedback

Capturing the right information at the right time is essential to a successful inbound marketing strategy — and it’s equally important in brand tracking. In-the-moment experiential feedback allows you to take the pulse of your brand. 

By understanding your buyers’ search channels (see chart above) your firm will know which channels you need to monitor for critical experiential feedback.

Brand Tracking Examples

For instance, many professional services firms leverage their website for lead generation. Potential buyers are willing to exchange an email address for premium content — a critical milestone on the buyer’s journey. Measuring content downloads is a good example of operational data that can be tracked over time. But how valuable was the content they downloaded? One way to find out is to send a simple automated follow-up email asking if they found the content useful. Combining these metrics will tell you the quantity of downloads and the quality of the content.

Other methods of collecting experiential feedback include embedding listening posts within your marketing content. For example, you might ask for feedback from your webinar attendees, or put a 1- to 2-question popup survey on your website. Simple techniques like these can help you understand how your buyers view your firm. You can also monitor comments and reactions to digital content, such as blog posts or LinkedIn posts, to gauge audience sentiment toward your brand.

These are just a couple examples of how experiential feedback can be collected at key listening posts along your buyer’s journey. While experiential feedback is a great way to monitor buyer engagement with your brand, it doesn’t always paint the full picture. To get a more holistic understanding of how buyers view your brand, you’ll need to conduct a brand tracking survey.

Surveying Your Buyers

Do you have a solid understanding of how your buyers view your brand today? If you do, then you probably already know what your key performance metrics are. If you don’t, consider conducting a brand survey to establish your firm’s baseline performance. Once your brand baseline is established, your firm will have a great starting point to track brand performance over time.

Only by understanding how buyers see you — your strengths and weaknesses — can you know where to focus your attention. This is where a  brand survey of your audience comes in handy. The data you gather allows your firm to establish powerful baseline metrics such as:

• Visibility/Awareness – How visible is your firm in the marketplace?
• Consideration – Would your prospects consider using your services?
• Relevancy – How relevant are your services to clients?
• Value – How valuable are the services you provide?
• Delivery – How well do you do what you say you will do?
• Loyalty – How likely are your clients to work with you in the future?
• Referrals – Have your clients referred your firm?
• Reputation – How good is your reputation in the marketplace?
• Visibility – How visible is your firm in the marketplace?

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Tracking

To accurately track your brand performance using a brand survey, you will need to ask a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions. Quantitative questions, such as likelihood to refer (NPS) or level of client satisfaction, are asked on a numeric scale and can be averaged across participants. These types of questions are easy to track over time by comparing the delta in averages across multiple brand surveys.

Open-ended (qualitative) questions are also important to include in brand surveys, but they are often more difficult to track. One way to quantify open-ended questions is to categorize the responses into categories or common themes. You then can measure the percentage of participants who mention these common themes, and monitor the changes in those percentages over time.

Tracking Your Competitors

Brand surveys can also be used to keep an eye on the competition. Within the survey you can ask respondents to list all firms they identify as a competitor to your firm. This method demands unaided responses and will likely yield a small number of responses. These are the competitors that are top of mind to your respondents.

You can also use an aided competitor question in which you provide a list of competitors and ask the respondent to select the ones they are aware of. Aided questions are helpful since respondents who are unable to think of a competitor are likely to recognize one or more if the names are in front of them. 

Like the baseline questions about your firm, both aided and unaided brand survey questions can be tracked over time. 

Brand Survey Methods

In B2B brand tracking, there are two main methods of administering a brand survey. The first method is to survey a group of your clients and/or prospects. Typically this is done by emailing a survey link or calling respondents to ask for participation. Using an impartial third party research firm (such as Hinge) for these types of brand studies usually delivers greater survey participation and more insightful, unbiased results. If participation is low, a firm can work with a sample provider to screen and purchase prospects. 

The second common brand survey method is to conduct a post-project survey at the conclusion of an engagement. Post-project surveys are important for understanding your brand perception, and they can also be used to measure firm performance. 

Brand Survey Length and Cadence

Brand surveys, whether standard or post-project, should typically be no more than 10-15 questions in length and last about 5-10 minutes. It’s important to keep these surveys short because respondents are often busy and can become irritated—and less likely to participate in the future—if the survey drones on for too long. 

Standard brand surveys should be administered roughly once a year. In the B2B space, a firm’s client base or prospect list may not be large enough to handle monthly or even biyearly surveys. It’s also important to avoid overburdening your prospects and clients with surveys, as it might negatively affect your brand perception. Lastly, brand tracking surveys can be both timely and expensive. From a financial standpoint alone, it might not be practical to conduct a brand survey multiple times a year.

How to Use Your Brand Tracking Results

Have you maintained your strengths? Are you addressing your challenges? What changes should you make to your brand strategy? By measuring key performance metrics, brand tracking tools can inform the answers to tough questions like these before it’s too late. 

To compete in today’s fast-changing marketplace, you need to continually take the pulse of your target audience. Only knowledge will equip you with the information you need to stay relevant in their minds. Brand tracking gives you essential tools to collect and make sense of these changes. It also offers a powerful way to quantify the return on your firm’s marketing investment.

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Brand Launch Defined

Brand launch is the process of creating a professional services brand where none currently exists. Since you are starting from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to choose how you wish to position your firm in the marketplace, which clients you want to serve and what services you will provide to them. It is the perfect time to develop a compelling value proposition.

Rebranding, on the other hand, involves an existing firm that already has clients, staff and at least some equity in its brand. Rebranding involves updating your identity, marketplace positioning and/or messaging. These changes can apply to the entire firm or a single practice or service. Of course, you have to consider how the new brand will affect existing client relationships, any brand equity your firm has accumulated over the years and your marketing momentum. That’s not the case with a brand launch, where you are starting from scratch with nothing but that big empty flip chart. Your brand equity is zero. And cash is almost always tight.

Both brand launch and rebranding are distinct from a brand extension, in which you add a new service line to an existing firm’s offerings. For example, if XYZ Systems introduces XYZ Cloud Services, that’s a brand extension.

How to Botch a Brand Launch

A brand launch offers a golden opportunity to make a great first impression. Yet many firms manage to botch it — beginning with their firm name. A lot of professional services take a time-honored approach and name their firm after their founders. Or they use a generic service-related term (such as “professional,” “systems,” “technology,” “services” or “associates”) in their name. The resulting moniker is usually long and clumsy, and it soon gets abbreviated into a forgettable string of letters. A long name is a liability on the web, too, where it spawns a domain that’s hard to type and remember.

Speaking of the web, many firms disappoint prospective buyers up front by underinvesting in their most important marketing tool — their website. A cheap-looking, undifferentiated website is a big turnoff. In fact, our research on referrals shows that a third of prospective buyers rule out a firm that was referred to them on the basis of its website alone.

When they need credibility the most, many startups miss all the opportunities to build it. It’s the equivalent of showing up at a formal event in your sweat pants. Yes, there is a better way.

Brand Launch Benefits

It may not seem that a new brand has many benefits to offer. With no clients, no track record and no cash, what’s to envy? But a new professional services brand does offer three compelling advantages:

• The thrill of new. In many cultures, and especially in the US, people are attracted to things that are new. It’s no coincidence that “new” is right up there with “free” as a killer marketing word.
• Strongest positioning platform. It is far easier to introduce a radically different positioning with a new brand. You don’t have to worry about how existing clients are going to react to the change, so you are free to shape your market positioning as you wish.
• Less brand equity at risk. If your positioning is not quite right out of the starting gate, it is much easier to adjust it without confusing the marketplace. This is why an existing firm may choose to launch a separate brand for a radically different positioning rather than put its existing brand equity at risk.

These advantages can be very helpful as you consider a strategy for your new brand launch.

Brand Launch Strategy

Launch strategy is very different for professional services than other types of businesses. In most cases, you have a reduced set of considerations to deal with. For example, service firms rarely use product packaging or need to convince retailers to carry their product. There are no storefronts or end cap displays to worry about. So a lot of the literature on launching a new brand doesn’t really fit your situation.

Unfortunately, just because you have fewer issues to contend with doesn’t mean that a launch is easier — just different. Most of those differences arise out of the nature of professional services.

For example, the way a consumer experiences a restaurant, hotel or clothing manufacturer is very different from the way a the client experiences a trial layer, accountant or computer security consultant.

In the professional services world, your brand is your reputation (what you are known for) multiplied by your visibility within your target audience. It is built more on trust and expertise than customer experience. If you want exceptional service or a “wow” experience, you go to a spa or a fine-dining restaurant, not to your auditor or structural engineer.

Expertise is the most important selection criteria of professional services buyers and it is second most likely factor that “tips the scale” in final selections. But there is a problem with expertise. It’s invisible. You can’t see it, feel it or tell if someone has it by looking at them. That means you have to make it tangible and visible to your target audience.

Given these differences there are a few key considerations to address when crafting your brand launch strategy.

1. What is the key value proposition for your target client?

Why will they choose your firm over the many other alternatives? Is it price alone? This is always risky unless you have a sustainable cost advantage. For most new professional services launches, the answer revolves around offering some sort of superior expertise.

2. How will you make your expertise visible?

If you are competing on expertise, visibility is essential. If you are competing on price, you at least need to position your expertise as equivalent to the competition’s: “We do the same work at the same quality level only it costs less.”

There are lots of techniques to build visibility. From books and webinars to videos and networking, you can use an educational approach to get the word out and demonstrate your firm’s expertise. To learn exactly what techniques work best and how to implement them, check out the Visible Expert course in Hinge University, our online training resource.

3. How will you pace your brand launch?

Will your launch be a gradual build or a “big-bang” rollout? The decision should be driven by the marketplace and the resources you can afford to put toward it. Some services have short time windows because they can be easily copied by competitors. Others have short lifespans because they address issues that come with a sunset date (think Y2K consulting services at the end of the last century). Both of these situations favor a big-bang introduction. In most other situations, however, a gradual build makes sense. Gradual builds eliminate the need for a large outlay of time and money before revenue has a chance to accrue. Big-bang introductions, on the other hand, often come with large up-front expenses.

Your decisions on these key strategic choices will become the backbone of your brand launch plan.

Building Your Brand Launch Plan

Much like the rebranding process, a brand launch has three phases. But with a launch, those stages tend to play out over a shorter time period. Think days and weeks, not weeks and months, as you build the key elements of your plan.

Phase 1: Get the Brand Strategy Right

This phase is aimed at making sure you have positioned the firm properly and have a compelling, easy-to-understand value proposition. As with any branding exercise, it starts with research. Since you don’t have existing clients, you must rely on interviews with prospects and influencers.

Often, your initial positioning will be built around the founders’ reputations and experience. In this case, you can research clients from past engagements to uncover key positioning elements.

Next, you will develop a core set of brand documents. These include a positioning statement and your messaging architecture, which identifies your primary audiences, the key messages to each, barriers to overcome and the proof points that equip you to defend each message. Together, these documents form the strategic foundation for your new brand.

You will, of course, lack case studies — a deficiency you will need to address quickly as you build a base of clients.

Phase 2: Build the Brand

In this phase, you develop your firm’s name, tagline, logo, website, marketing materials and other brand identity tools. It’s fine to develop the most essential pieces first, then add the rest later. This allows you to conserve cash and (because you are not locked into an expensive set of business collateral) gives you room to evolve your messaging as you gain more experience.

In most cases, the most useful tools will be your website, a pitch deck and a single-sheet overview of your firm and its story. Since you are unlikely to have a wealth of case studies, you may want to talk about why you founded your firm and what compelling benefits you bring to your clients. That may not be enough to build critical mass, but it should give you enough material to convince a few initial clients.

You may also want to consider exploring online video, which can be an excellent medium to tell a new firm’s story.

This stage is usually capped off by the development of a brand rollout plan. This plan lays out exactly how the brand will be introduced and developed, including which audiences you will target with your rollout, and in what order. A detailed launch calendar is a great tool to use in your planning process. In the context of a brand launch, the rollout plan takes on a lot of significance, so be sure to allow sufficient time to do it right.

Phase 3: Brand Rollout

Next, you’ll need to implement the plan and introduce your brand new brand to the world. In our experience, most folks are excited by the initial reception of a new brand. If your new brand is well positioned, it will appear fresh and innovative to the marketplace — and offer prospective clients a benefit that is both unique and compelling. That tends to get people excited.

When new brands stumble at this stage, their problems can often be traced back to a failure to get the strategy right. These firms rush to market with a “us-too” market positioning that fails to deliver any real differentiation or competitive advantage. Attempting to be just like your competitors without the benefit of a track record is not a formula for success.

Minor adjustments to the messaging and positioning are quite common during rollout. These adjustments are a normal part of the evolution of a new brand and not a sign of failure.

Building the Strength of Your New Brand

Success can be a double-edged sword. If you have tapped into a healthy market and are offering a compelling set of new benefits, you very well may experience a surge in demand for your services. That’s when delivering on your brand promise can become a challenge. More than a few firms have stumbled at this stage.

The other major challenge is retaining your focus. As you help clients with their critical problems, they may ask you to take on issues that lie at the periphery of your core offerings. Do you accept the assignment?

It’s tempting. After all, diversifying risk is important, right? Be careful. You can easily dilute your brand by taking on too many non-core tasks. While there may be short-term financial benefits to stretching your service offerings, the real value of a brand comes from its distinctiveness and clarity.

A Final Thought

A brand launch is the perfect time to set your firm or practice on a course of lasting success. You have maximum flexibility and the advantage of being novel and exciting. However, while a brand launch offers many potential benefits, it comes with significant challenges, as well.

The most important thing to remember is to concentrate on getting the strategy right. Do your research well. If you can offer a compelling value proposition to an appreciative group of target clients, everything else is easier.

The post Brand Launch: Creating a Brand New Professional Services Brand appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We’ll walk through nine steps that will help sell the value of your services and win new clients.

1. Figure out the why

“Why do you need a value proposition?” If you can’t easily articulate why prospects should hire you, prospective clients won’t be able to either. It’s important to understand the value you have to offer your clients and express this clearly and succinctly. 

2. Really understand what you do

Take some time to understand exactly what services you provide so you can communicate this in your value proposition. When it comes to defining your “what,” consider these factors:

• Areas of business you serve
• Types of problems you solve
• Types of firms you serve

You could do this as a team exercise and have your colleagues write out what they think the organization does and compare notes. As part of the process, reflect on your firm’s positioning statement, if you have one.

3. Define your target audience

Narrow your target audience and let your expertise with that audience shine. Not only will it help differentiate your firm from the competition, but prospective clients will be more likely to engage your services knowing that you really understand their business.

4. Determine the how

• Think about the problems that you solve for your clients. 
• Think about the benefits you provide to your clients.
  • When you communicate these make sure you are speaking about benefits, not features. Often, people identify features (such as best approach or best expertise) rather than actual benefits (such as ability to eliminate bottlenecks, improve organizational productivity, etc.).

Start with a list and narrow it down to the ones that will make the biggest impact and distinguish you from competitors.

5. Prove it

Providing proof of your abilities will create another important layer of credibility. Develop a list of strong references that you can share with clients. In addition to this, think about where you can showcase studies of your success to boast your company’s credibility. Could this be done on your website? Social channels? Word of mouth? The opportunity here is endless. 

Don’t be afraid to add specific details such as clients you’ve served or years of expertise. These details that distinguish you from your competitors.

6. Create it.

Use this simple formula from Consulting Success to create your value proposition:

Who your customers are + What you provide them + Why they buy from you

Read over your value statement and make sure you’ve addressed all three points. Next, be sure that your statement is clear, no longer than a few sentences, and that it differentiates you from the competition. Your differentiators need to highlight something you do well that your competitors aren’t highlighting. 

7. Use it.

Your value proposition is part of your branding so use it everywhere—your website, as part of presentations, on collateral, social media sites, and anywhere else an opportunity exists!

8. Test it.

You need to make sure you’ve crafted a value proposition that will win new clients. The easiest way to test your value proposition is by trying it out! When you chat with prospective clients, see how people respond to you. Is it clear for people to understand? Do they seem to understand the value you offer? Do they seem to believe that you can deliver on your promise?

If you answered no to any of these questions, it’s back to the drawing board. Remember it’s worth the effort to get your value proposition right.

9. Revisit it.

As your company grows and services expand, you may want to revisit your value proposition. For management consulting, it’s especially important as services change and you develop new expertise.

Developing a value proposition for your firm is a crucial way to distinguish yourself from competition and easily be able to explain your services to prospects. So make sure you carve out the time and mental focus to develop one.

Already have a great value proposition? Have more brand building suggestions? Share them below.

The post 9 Steps to Building a Unique Value Proposition for Consulting Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We are used to hearing that a firm’s most important asset is its people, not necessarily the brand. But people come and go. And unless an individual’s reputation and industry presence is so strong that they impact the entire firm’s marketplace position, “people” only get you so far.

Your brand is what prevails over time and beats the competition.

Strong brands hinge on strong differentiators. Differentiators are the foundational components of communicating your brand clearly and consistently. If there is no difference between what you say about your firm and what competitors say about their firms, you have a weak brand. Unfortunately, this can have a negative impact on your firm’s growth and profitability. In our own research, we’ve found that high growth firms are 3X more likely to have a strong, easy-to-understand differentiators.

And within the realm of professional services, technology services firms struggle to articulate the right technology differentiator. With often complex service offerings with even more complex acronyms and terminology that describe those offerings, technology firms too often fall back on differentiating around being a “trusted partner” and having “best-in-class people.”

Here is a quick test to see if you have a true differentiator. Think of some way you believe your firm is different. Then ask if a potential competitor could ever say the opposite. If the answer is “no,” it is probably not a good differentiator (this is why having great people and offering great client service don’t pass this test).

Remember that a truly strong differentiator must pass three criteria: It must be true. It must be relevant to your clients. And it must be provable.

Let’s first peel away some very common misconceptions about what makes a bonafide technology differentiator:

• Your differentiator is not your firm’s name.
• Your differentiator is not your logo or tagline.
• Your differentiator is not your website or marketing collateral.
• Your differentiator is not your mission statement, culture, or core values.
• Your differentiator is not your people.

Instead, each of these are tools that help your differentiator communicate your brand. But they are not differentiators in and of themselves.

How do you then come up with relevant brand differentiators, ones that support your brand and help you stand out in the marketplace?

Our research points to five key factors around which firms should consider building their differentiators to achieve brand strength:

1. A Well-Defined Target Audience

While it’s tempting to think of your firm’s differentiators as having universal appeal, it’s rarely the case. It’s far more strategic to build your differentiators around a clearly defined and well-understood target market. To be meaningful, a differentiator must be relevant to “someone.” No differentiator can try to be relevant to everyone. Many professional services firms are reluctant to specify a target audience. They do so at their own disadvantage.

2. Relevance to the Success of the Target Audience

Your differentiator must also be seen as being relevant to the success of your client. It’s not enough to be nice people or even knowledgeable and helpful. Those fall into the “nice-to-have” category. The real driver of a successful brand through relevant differentiation is your ability to define the problem, solve the problem, and make your clients successful. You aren’t just a bystander. You are a contributor to your clients’ success.

Research Report

Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Technology & Software Edition

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3. Proof Through Marketing With Informative Content

Content marketing involves providing a steady stream of useful information to potential clients or influencers. Think educational rather than promotional. Over time, potential clients learn how you approach problems and develop trust in your firm. When they need assistance, your firm is at the top of their list. Content marketing relies on winning clients by sharing something of value rather than trying to persuade or “sell” them. As such, it is a great way to call out your differentiators, build a brand, and generate leads.

4. Promotion of Your Visible Experts^®

While your people in general are not a strong differentiator on which to hang your brand, many firms have legitimate experts that become well known and influential among their target client group. While small in number, we call these fortunate few Visible Experts. By deliberately developing one or more of these high-profile experts, a firm can dramatically increase the power of its brand.

The strength of a Visible Expert’s personal brand transfers to the entire firm by virtue of the “Halo Effect,” so well known in the marketing community. In the same way, as a university becomes more prestigious when it has a Nobel Prize winning faculty member, so too a professional services firm benefits by having a nationally known industry thought leader on its team.

5.  Soul Searching Your Expertise

What industry verticals do you already have strength in? What kind of services are you good at delivering? Where do you offer the most value and enjoy the greatest success? Most established firms have a large number of industry or service combinations to consider, since growth has often been opportunistic.

Because the differentiators on which you develop your brand are so central to the ongoing success of your firm, they should be a matter of focus and investment. In reality, this is rarely the case. Because so few competitors are giving brand building and differentiators the attention they require, you have a great opportunity to benefit and gain a meaningful competitive advantage.

Free Resource

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Now, more than half a century later, the concept of positioning is just as relevant to businesses — and probably more so. If anything, today’s professional services marketplace is much larger and more crowded. Buyers have a bewildering array of firms to choose from, and with the rise of the Internet, local firms are contending with companies across the nation, if not the world.

What’s a firm to do? How do you compete when there’s barely room to breathe?

That’s where brand positioning comes in. It elegantly explains how people see the marketplace and prescribes a way firms can carve out a place in the minds of their buyers.

Brand Positioning Defined

At its simplest, brand positioning is the process of setting your business apart from your competitors in a way that builds preference for you among your target audience. Its goal is to associate your firm with an idea or category in the minds of people who might buy your services.

Let’s consider a couple of examples.

What do you think of when you read the words, “soft drink” or “pop”? Did Coke or Pepsi come to mind? These two products are positioned to dominate the soft drink category.

Now let’s try a service. What company does “overnight shipping” make you think of? Even though other companies offer overnight delivery, FedEx owns that category — it has built its entire identity and operations around doing it better than anyone else.

In theory, any professional services firm can build a strong association between their brand and an idea. But to be successful, your positioning must be 1) different (it’s tough to take over a leadership position already held by another business — remember, Avis has been #2 since 1953.); and 2) visible (if nobody has heard of your firm, your positioning can’t take root).

Typically, your brand positioning is articulated in your brand positioning statement. But I’ll have a lot more to say about that a bit later.

Why Brand Positioning Is Important

When you have a well-defined brand position, your firm has many advantages. Positioning can provide a conceptual template for your brand, your marketing messages, the services you offer and even the way you structure your pricing.

Here are a few of the key benefits of brand positioning:

1. It focuses you on a specific target market. When you provide a limited set of services to a limited audience, your marketing becomes more powerful and effective. You are perceived as a high-value expert.
2. It clarifies how you are different from competitors. You’ll finally know exactly what sets you apart and be able to talk about your firm in a way that gets prospects excited.
3. It shows how to win new clients. Positioning arms your business development team with critical arguments they can use in the nurturing and closing processes.
4. It drives creative decisions. When you understand the core message you need to communicate to prospects, you can make informed decisions throughout the creative process. Your positioning becomes the DNA of your visual brand.
5. It drives service development and pricing decisions. Knowing how you compare to your competitors helps you decide what new services to offer, and when. Are you positioned as a source of innovative services? A low-cost provider? A specialist or a generalist? The answers to these questions can affect what services you offer and how to price them.

5 Types of Brand Positioning Strategy

Positioning strategies can take many forms, but not all are appropriate for professional services firms. Below are five strategies that are most relevant to positioning a firm like yours:

1. Cost-driven positioning. “We offer everything those other firms do, but we cost less.” This is a very challenging strategy unless you have an inherent cost advantage. Technology can be your best friend if you are using it more effectively than your competitors or your worst enemy if you are behind others in a cost-driven strategy.
2. Niche service specialization. In this strategy, you focus on offering a service that is not widely available through competitors. You offer specialized expertise that, presumably, a generalist would not have. This approach can work well unless the service begins to generate strong demand and new competitors emerge to dilute your “specialness.”
3. Industry specialization. This is a popular and often effective way to position a professional services firm. It is another form of specialized expertise, and it allows you to tightly focus your marketing and evolve your services as your market changes. The implication of industry specialization is that your firm has deep experience working with similar businesses. This approach comes with risks, however. If your industry experiences an economic decline, your fortunes may follow. It is also easy for new competitors to enter the fray and disrupt your positioning.
4. Role-focused specialization. “We help CEOs succeed” is an example of role-focused positioning — targeting a particular function in the organization. Instead of specializing in a particular industry or service, you target a cohort of people. These buyers will perceive you as more tuned in to their needs and expectations that you offer specific knowledge or expertise that will make their job easier.
5. Quality of service positioning. This is one of the most common strategies used by professional services firms, and (with rare exceptions) it is one of the least effective. “Nobody’s more committed to quality,” “we deliver the best service” and similar messages are so ubiquitous in the marketplace that they utterly fail to impress buyers. Of course, buyers do want quality and customer service — but these traits are table stakes and they are rarely criteria used to select a firm.

Brand Positioning Examples

What does a well-positioned firm look like? Below we include a few examples of how some of our own clients have positioned themselves in the marketplace. These examples represent the purest distillation of their brand positioning—simple ideas that anyone in the marketplace can understand but which are difficult for competitors to copy.

Vault Consulting

“The nation’s leading accounting and research firm for nonprofits and associations.”

Why it works: Vault’s unusual combination of accounting and research services, in conjunction with their industry focus, allows them to claim leadership status.

Sellers Dorsey

“The nation’s leading Medicaid consultancy to health care providers, payors and state governments.”

Why it works: They do just one thing: Medicaid consulting. And they have built a market leadership position around that specialization.

20-20 Services

“We focus on just one thing: equipping today’s accounting professionals with all the skills, knowledge and leadership training they need to thrive and grow.”

Why it works: They focus on a powerful need in the CPA industry: keeping accounting professionals fully trained and equipped to build their business.

What Is a Brand Positioning Statement?

A brand positioning statement is a succinct, easy-to-understand paragraph that describes your firm’s positioning in the marketplace. It should address three questions: 1) What do you do? 2) Who do you serve? 3) How are you different from similar firms in the marketplace? It may also include other key reasons clients prefer your firm over others. A brand positioning statement is primarily an internal document that a firm’s marketing and business development teams can use to craft differentiated marketing language—though some of its language may be used verbatim in public-facing messaging. In Step 4 below, we explain how to write your own positioning statement.

The Brand Positioning Process

Ready to develop a brand positioning strategy for your own firm? The steps below will give you a solid roadmap to get there. I’ve also included links to other resources that will help fill in some of the details. Let’s get started!

Step 1. Start with your overall business imperatives. What are you trying to accomplish as a firm? Your positioning is a fundamental pillar of business strategy, and it affects how you drive growth and attract the talent you need to sustain your expansion. If you don’t have your business goals written down already, sit down with your management team and make sure everyone has a clear set of priorities. That way, when you begin formulating your positioning statement you will a clear destination in mind.

Step 2. Research your target clients and competitors. According to a study of professional services marketing, firms that have a strong understanding of their audiences and competition are more than twice as likely to be high-growth businesses (those that grow at least 20% year over year). This type of investigation is often called brand research, and it is typically conducted by an independent entity to ensure its confidentiality and encourage more honest feedback from participants. It usually involves interviews with current clients, prospects, and referral sources. It also includes an analysis of your competitors — what they are saying about themselves and how your audience perceives them.

Brand research can also identify strengths and weaknesses you weren’t able to see before. In addition, you’ll learn what factors potential clients value most during the selection process.

And brand research is critical to the success of the next step.

Step 3. Identify your differentiators. This is where your business goals and brand research turn into marketing gold. Drawing on the insights of your team, external perceptions of your firm and a new understanding of your competitors’ positioning, you will pick out characteristics that both set you apart from your competition and are valuable to prospective clients at the time they select a firm.

Strong differentiators must also meet three other criteria: they must be 1) true, 2) provable and 3) relevant to your target audience. If a differentiator isn’t true, clients will often sense it and approach your firm with skepticism. That’s why you should be able to support each differentiator with evidence. Often you will uncover proof in your brand research (for example, a finding that “9 out 10 clients refer us to others” is a nice statistic to reinforce a variety of differentiators).

Some differentiators may be characteristics that you discover in your research (“clients find us to be highly flexible”), while others may be a specialization that you have already cultivated (“we provide network security services exclusively to accounting firms”). If you find your existing differentiators lacking, you may decide to pursue a new area of focus or concentrate on a particular area of strength. While this approach will be aspirational at first, it can work so long as you truly commit your firm to it and can prove you are doing it going forward. If you are struggling to think of possible differentiators, consult this list of 21 professional service differentiators for ideas. Or, take a look at this list of the 12 worst differentiators for professional services firms to make sure your existing differentiators aren’t included.

To learn more about uncovering your differentiators, check out our free Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms. Also, I suggest you read this blog post on competitive differentiation.

Step 4. Craft your brand positioning statement. Now it’s time to translate your differentiators into a story that clearly communicates your competitive advantage. A positioning statement distills your key buying propositions into a short paragraph. It’s an internal document — because it is compact it’s not intended to be used verbatim on your website or in your marketing materials. Instead, think of it as a source you can return to again and again when you need the inspiration to describe your firm or persuade people to buy from you.

A brand positioning statement can take two different forms: a crafted paragraph or a prompted statement. Developing a crafted paragraph takes more skill and time, but some firms find that it translates more easily into marketing messages. A prompted statement is quicker and simpler to assemble — your team fills in the blanks with the appropriate information.

Here’s an example of a positioning statement in paragraph form:

Newco is the nation’s leading IT consultancy that specializes in law firms and legal departments. Our team of attorneys, engineers, CIOs, executive directors, and project managers is uniquely positioned to make your practice more productive and profitable. We’re familiar with the hundreds of software applications used by the legal community, and we’ve developed a suite of tools that makes migrating and configuring systems faster and more efficient. We also have a reputation for doing a job once and doing it right — that’s why 4 out of 5 clients put us on a long-term contract. When you need the best legal IT advice and support, Newco is the easy choice.

And here’s what a prompted statement template, ready to be filled out, looks like:

If Newco had used the prompted statement, this is how it might read:

Whichever format you choose, your brand positioning statement should include the following elements:

• Your firm name
• What you do
• Who you serve
• Why clients choose you
• Proof that supports your claims

Okay, let’s break down the Newco example and make sure we’re covered.

What’s their name? Newco. (Check!)

What services do they provide? IT consulting services.

Who is their target audience? Law firms and legal departments.

Why do clients choose them over other firms? They work exclusively with legal practices, so they are industry specialists. This gives them an advantage when pursuing business with law firms and legal departments over generalist IT firms that serve multiple industries. They also claim to be the leaders in their niche.

What else supports their positioning? They have developed a proprietary suite of tools that allows them to do their job better than their competition. And because their team includes professionals who have been in their clients’ shoes (attorneys, CIOs, executive directors) they are well attuned to their needs. They also have a great reputation, which they can demonstrate by citing the high percentage of clients that put them on long-term contracts.

So how do you use your brand positioning statement? The first thing many firms do is develop their elevator pitch — that short description of your firm that answers the question, “What does your firm do?” Keep your elevator pitch short — a sentence or two will usually do the trick — and write it in natural, conversational language. If people were to memorize it, it should sound like something a person would actually say.

You can also use your positioning statement as the foundation of your messaging architecture. Your messaging architecture is a document that spells out key messages for each of your audiences and addresses specific objections they may have. For example, “Why would I choose your firm over a better-known competitor?”

Finally, you will use your positioning statement as inspiration for headlines and persuasive language on your website and in marketing collateral.

Step 5. Implement your new positioning. No strategy, no matter how well-conceived, will survive poor implementation. You have to have the right communications tools in place — pieces that will support the new message you are delivering. And that may require revisiting everything you use to market your services. At the very least, you will want to reflect your new positioning in your marketing materials and website.

For some firms, however, implementation involves rethinking their overall identity or initiating a rebranding process. This process can involve a soup-to-nuts overhaul — a new name, tagline, logo, website, marketing materials, and more. Typically, this happens when a firm either undergoes a change in strategy or realizes that its brand is out of date and no longer reflects the caliber of the firm they have become.

As you develop your new positioning, think about how you will convey that message to the world. What needs to change, what can stay the same, and what new components need to be introduced?

Overcoming Positioning Challenges

Repositioning your firm isn’t necessarily easy. It depends on the raw materials you have to work with and the mindset you bring to the process. Some firms discover that they just don’t have strong differentiators. In this all-too-common situation, a firm has four options:

1. Embrace a new focus in an underserved area. This is the most effective — and difficult — option. It almost always means letting go of one or more client segments to build momentum and mind-share in another. If you think you can pull it off, pursue this approach with all the energy you have. It can pay huge dividends.
2. Own a trait. Identify an aspect of your business that you would like to associate with your firm. It’s okay if competitors do it, too — so long as nobody else is using it in the same way. For example, an architecture firm client of ours uses industry research to inform its design process. This “evidence-based design” approach isn’t new, but it’s not universally practiced, and none of their competitors were talking about it. So the firm decided to own it. As part of their brand positioning strategy, they began using the word “scientific” to describe their design philosophy. By tying their approach to science, they could begin building a reputation as the most methodical and credible option in their market.
3. Combine two traits. This is a mashup of options 1 and 2 above. Select two primary traits or functions of your business and combine them. You may be able to claim that you are the leader at the intersection of those two things. For example, we positioned an accounting firm as “the nation’s leading specialist in fair market valuations and financial transaction consulting to the healthcare industry.” Since no other firm was preeminent in providing both of those services to the healthcare industry, our client could credibly call itself a leader.
4. Do nothing. Or promote weak differentiators, which amounts to the same thing. You can say that you hire only the best people, or that you deliver the best customer service, but nobody will care.

Brand Positioning Strategy Examples

Professional services firms often struggle to differentiate and position themselves. So I’d like to end this piece by examining a handful of real-world examples of brand positioning strategy — specifically, how firms in different industries have used positioning strategy to become more competitive, grow faster and be more profitable.

Accounting

Lester + Company is a Dallas-based accounting firm. At first, they were a typical general accounting firm with a diverse range of business clients. Their fortunes turned for the better when they decided to pivot and specialize in serving one of their strongest client segments: restaurants. Over time, they decided to narrow their focus, even more, to concentrate on chain restaurants. Today, they are thriving and growing in their highly specialized area of expertise. “It’s taken us to a whole new level of success,” says CEO, Andrew Lester.

Brand positioning: The accounting firm for multi-location restaurants.

Executive Search

Melissa Henderson was a Managing Director at a large, international search firm when she had a crazy idea. What if C-level executives could hire their own personal representative, much like an elite sports agent? It would turn the executive search industry on its head. (Conventional executive search firms are paid by companies who are looking for talent, not by the job seekers.) So Melissa left her job and founded Summit Executive Resources, a firm that helps top executives find the leadership and board positions they have always wanted — with the high-touch personal service they deserve.

Brand positioning: The personal search firm for C-level executives.

Healthcare Consulting

Ascendient is a top-50 consulting firm that serves hospital systems around the nation. Led by a team of practitioners and academics, they have a unique perspective on the future of healthcare. In fact, they believe most healthcare systems are not prepared for the massive changes that are about to transform the marketplace. To make their perspective more visible and differentiate their firm from consultants that focus primarily on today’s problems, Ascendient decided to reposition its firm around its future vision.

Brand positioning: We’re rethinking the future of healthcare.

Legal

Walsh Colucci Lubeley and Walsh is a law firm outside Washington, DC. For decades, they were a general law firm with a strong practice in zoning and land use. But when the top firm in that space dissolved, their leadership recognized an opportunity and quickly rebranded their firm as The Land Lawyers. While they continue to offer a few general legal services, Walsh Colucci focuses their brand message squarely on its area of strength. Today, they have become the region’s dominant player in commercial real estate law.

Brand positioning: Northern Virginia’s premier commercial real estate law firm.

Conclusion

Most professional services firms are poorly positioned in the marketplace. They believe that they can get more clients by opening their arms wide to everyone — the broader their reach, the more business will float into their embrace. But that’s not what really happens. When buyers look around and see awkwardly splayed arms everywhere, they have nowhere to gravitate.

That’s why having a brand positioning strategy is so important. It gives your prospects something to get interested in — and will ultimately convince them to buy from you. Your target audience will find you many times more fascinating than a generalist firm because you have the specialized expertise they need. And as a specialist, you can often charge more, to boot.

If your firm isn’t positioned to consistently attract premium clients, take heart. You’re not alone. Any firm can sharpen its positioning and build an enviable competitive advantage. All it takes is a little courage to take the first step.

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The post Brand Positioning Strategy for the Professional Services Industry appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

That is because a strong brand—and an effective brand strategy—results in a higher return on investment for your marketing dollar. It is as true for professional services brands as it is for consumer products.

Our focus on professional services has informed us of a clear understanding of what makes a strong brand.

Brand Strength = Reputation x Visibility.

Whether developed intentionally or not, every professional services firm has a brand that stands for something. Our research indicates that high-growth professional services brands are more likely to have a strong differentiator – an easy-to-prove and relevant characteristic – as part of their brand strategy. That is because differentiation (or specialization) helps the firm generate leads and improve closing percentages.

As firms grow and mature, the management of their brand strategy can become a challenge. Why?

Because, as collective expertise grows, there is a tendency to diversify the firm’s service offering. To nurture and grow the profitability of those new services, firms often opt to brand each service. But, that might not be the best approach.

When it comes to brand strategy for a growing professional services firm, it may be better to go in the direction of a branded house rather than a house of brands. Let me explain.

Types of brand strategy

1. Branded house

In this model, the firm is the brand. Services and market sectors (or practice areas) are subsets of that primary brand and are not formally branded. Apple and Google are globally known for this model. Under Apple’s primary brand comes many subset brands: Mac, Apple Music, and iPhone.

Certainly, even smaller firms can successfully pull off this model. In all instances, the subset brands are recognized, but not to the extent that they overshadow or detract from the primary brand.

In professional services, the branded house approach is also known as a one-firm brand strategy. The firm has a single brand: logo mark, marketplace positioning, and messaging. The subordinate service offerings share these brand elements but contain their own unique messaging points.

2. House of brands

In the second brand strategy model, the branding is focused on the subset of brands. The primary brand gets little or no attention. Ever hear of a company called Newell? How about Rubbermaid, Sharpie, or Irwin Tools? Newell is a good example of the house of brands strategy—Newell is the little-known primary brand, under which come the well-known subordinate brands listed above.

A house of brands approach requires significant investment in dedicated resources because each brand operates as its own company in terms of brand elements and messaging.

Benefits of the branded house strategy

In professional services, the branded house strategy is more commonly used. Let’s look at the reasons why.

A strong brand—one with both high visibility and a strong reputation—requires careful nurturing. Our research shows that many professional services firms overlook brand visibility, and their brands are weaker for it.

In today’s marketplace, brands must be visible both online and offline.

Our research on this topic bears out the reputation-visibility imbalance. About 57% of surveyed buyers rated the sellers of professional services highly for having a strong reputation, but only about 23% thought the same sellers had very good visibility.

If your goal is to enhance both visibility and reputation it is easier to focus on a single brand—the branded house strategy.

It’s no surprise that brand strength is more easily attainable under the guise of a branded house. That is because the firm channels its financial and labor resources toward strengthening a single brand, rather than diluting resources that compete in the building of multiple brands.

When a house of brands makes sense

Simply put, a strong professional services brand isn’t built overnight. Lacking the understanding of what makes an effective branding strategy, firms can easily fall prey to building a house of brands to support the diversification of services.

When that happens, the professional services firm must make accommodations for funding and staffing of multiple brands, which leads to a division of marketing budgets across all of the offerings.

Under the house of brands, the firm operates as a holding company for the various brands; managing each brand as though it were a separate company and dealing with all of the necessary legal requirements of this strategy certainly carries greater complexity.

Does that mean that a house of brands in professional services is never a good idea? Not necessarily.

In some specific cases, such as state licensure requirements, funding, or liability structures make it more reasonable to pursue a house of brands approach. For example, an environmental engineering firm engaged in Superfund land reclamation services may consider a house of brands to limit liabilities.

Sometimes the matrix of brand promise and audience profile is the driver of the decision. When brands create sub-brands that have unrelated brand promises (i.e. what they deliver), which in turn have very different buyer or audience profiles, it can also make sense to create a house of brands.

The key to determining what brand strategy is most appropriate for your firm depends on strategic goals, audience, resources, and commitment. Developing a house of brands can potentially compound the challenge of building your firm’s overall brand strength. And measuring the return on investment for a single brand is not nearly as challenging as measuring that same return on many parallel brands.

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If you are thinking about bringing new life to your professional services firm brand, this article can help you answer questions like these and lay a path to a smooth and successful outcome. While every firm is different, there are a set of rebranding strategies that are proven to work for any firm, whatever its size or industry.

In this article we explore common reasons firms undergo a rebrand. Next, we take you through a proven seven-step rebranding strategy that will deliver strong differentiators and positioning, clear messaging, and a fresh visual identity. Finally, we examine two real-world examples of firms that have undergone a rebrand. 

Let’s begin by answering an essential question: why?

Purpose of Rebranding

There are many reasons why a professional services firm might consider rebranding. Here are four of the most common:

1. Refresh a tired brand. The marketplace is continually evolving. After a few years of neglect, a brand can lose its relevancy, look and sound dated, and become a drag on a firm’s success. 
2. Address a merger or acquisition. A merger or major acquisition can create a major shift in target audience or business strategy. It may even require a new name.
3. Overcome a public relations crisis. Rebranding can be an effective way to change negative public perceptions and begin the process of rebuilding a firm’s reputation.
4. Reposition the firm. Most professional services firms lack strong differentiators or a compelling reason for buyers to choose them over competitors. Rebranding can uncover your differentiators and tell a powerful story.

These four reasons have one thing in common: firms need to connect at an emotional level with their audiences. Rebranding equips firms with the messaging, visuals, and credibility to stand apart—and stand for something. In a crowded and confusing marketplace, a strong brand gives buyers a reason to notice you. And to care.

If you have read this far in this article, you are probably at least thinking about a rebrand. Whatever specific reason is driving your interest, you have to consider one more thing: how do you rebrand your firm in a way that yields the business result you desire?

That’s what we’re going to cover next. What is the right strategy to rebrand your professional services firm? Let’s find out! (For more in-depth coverage, check out our Rebranding Guide.)

A 7-Step Rebranding Campaign

If you go into it without a plan, rebranding your firm can take many wrong turns and waste a lot of time and money. But if you approach it methodically and lay a solid foundation, the process should be smooth and exciting. The rebranding strategy below is based on two decades of experience with professional services firms of all stripes. It works because it builds on each piece that comes before. 

1. Start With the Business Reason

Any rebranding strategy should start with a thorough understanding of the business reason behind the rebranding. Is it driven by a need to accelerate growth? Does your firm need to compete with larger, more established competitors?

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Some of these business cases are very easy to make, such as a merger of two firms. Others are more subtle, such as outgrowing your image. If you are not clear about the business reason driving the effort, you run the risk of wasting a tremendous amount of resources. Some of the other top reasons to rebrand your professional services firm includes:

• You need to compete at a higher level or in a new market.
• Your brand no longer reflects who you are.
• Your firm is spun off from an existing brand.
• You have a legal reason compelling you to change.
• You need to simplify and focus your message.
• You have a new marketing team.
• You are launching a new service line.

2. Research Your Firm and Your Target Clients

When you are clear on the business case for a rebranding, the next step is to conduct independent research on your firm and your clients. If you are attempting to move into a new market, that research should include your new target clients as well. The goal is to have an objective understanding of your current brand perception and competencies.

Without this research, you will be operating from an internal perspective only. Our own research on professional services buyers and sellers shows that virtually all firms have blind spots and distort how the marketplace sees them. After all, we are all human. Without objective research, you will build a brand on false assumptions.

3. Use Positioning and Messaging to Capture Your Brand Strategy

As you develop your firm’s market positioning and messaging architecture, you will uncover the essence of your brand strategy. Your market positioning is a brief description of where you fit into the market space. Are you an innovative leader or a low cost provider?

This positioning will drive many of your subsequent decisions. But you can’t just make something up. It needs to balance who you are as a firm and who you want to become. You must be able to support your positioning or your brand will be hollow.

Your messaging architecture articulates your messages to each of your main audiences. These messages must be consistent with your overall brand and supportable. This is not marketing copy. It is the skeleton upon which marketing copy is built.

4. Build Your Brand Identity

This is the part of the rebranding strategy where you develop the visual elements that will communicate your brand. Think firm name (if needed), logo, tagline, colors, business card design, stationary, and the like. These elements are often described in a brand style guidelines document, which provides a set of parameters to ensure your brand is implemented consistently across all of your marketing materials.

Many folks confuse these elements with your brand. Your brand is your reputation and your visibility, not your firm’s name or its logo. Your brand identity is a sort of visual shorthand for your brand.

5. Build Your Website and Online Presence

Your website is your single most important communication and business development tool. It is the place where you can tell a compelling story to each of your audiences. It is the first place a prospective client or employee will turn to learn more about your firm.

It is no exaggeration to say that a website and your online presence are the heart of a modern professional services firm. All rebranding strategies eventually involve your website. In a very real way, a website is built on the framework of your messaging architecture. Together with your remaining online presence (think social media, for example), it is the full expression of your positioning.

6. Marketing Collateral

At this point in your rebranding strategy, you will develop all of the marketing materials that you need to communicate your brand and services messages. Think pitch decks, proposal templates, brochures, one-sheet fliers and trade show booths.

These are the tools that you will use to communicate your message. They should be firmly anchored in your brand strategy.

7. Brand Building Plan

The final element of your rebranding strategy is to develop a plan to promote and strengthen your new brand. How will you launch it internally? In professional services, it is essential that your employees embrace the new brand. After all, they are your product.

It’s also important that you build the brand in a way that communicates your firm’s reputation and expertise, as well as its name. It must communicate your market positioning. Brand building is different for professional services.

Some rebranding strategies fail because they try to shortcut the process. Others fail because they picked the wrong partners to work with. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Start with a sound rebranding strategy. Find an experienced partner. Give rebranding the attention it deserves and the rewards will follow. A well-positioned firm that clearly communicates its brand is a formidable competitor indeed.

Rebranding Strategy Examples

To help you understand how a strategy like this plays out in the real world, we’d like to share two examples from our own practice at Hinge. In this way, you can see with your own eyes how and why rebranding works. 

Example 1: Jones CPA Group

Strickland & Jones was a 3-office accounting firm in the Tidewater region of Virginia. One of two founding partners had just left the firm, and the remaining owner—Stephen Jones—wanted to reconceive the firm and position it for growth.

Hinge took the firm through the rebranding process, including interviewing 43 clients, influencers and staff members and renaming the firm Jones CPA Group. During the research phase, we discovered that what clients valued most from the firm was their accessible, friendly, approachable style. We decided to position them as great communicators. While communication may not be a unique trait among CPA firms, none of their competitors were talking about it, much less building their brand upon it. And Jones was prepared to go all-in.  

To bring this concept to the fore, we did two things: we developed the tagline, “Let’s talk success,” and we created a logo that incorporated a speech bubble element. Together, they delivered a clear message that anyone could understand.

We also created a suite of stationery and collateral they could use to carry their message to the marketplace. 

Example 2: S&ME

S&ME was a top-100 civil engineering firm that had grown through acquisitions—and it showed. With more than 30 offices across the eastern United States, they had no unified message or brand. It was time to look, sound, and act like the leader they were.

Hinge conducted research that provided the insights upon which we could construct a new, unified brand. We learned that perhaps their greatest asset was their versatility, so we built their positioning around that concept. To communicate that positioning to the marketplace, we developed a tagline: “Built for versatility.”

Next, we redesigned the firm’s logo to anchor their new visual identity and give them a modern look unlike any of their competitors. The new mark features the letters S, M, and E configured out of just two basic shapes—a literal expression of versatility!

We developed a new color palette, dominated by a vivid green, and built out the rest of their identity and collateral. Finally, we designed and launched a powerful new high-performance website, featuring the new positioning and equipping the firm to grow with confidence.

Read the full S&ME Case Story

Take a Bold Step Forward

If you are ready to embark on a rebranding journey, use the roadmap we outline above to get the most out of your investment. Change is never easy, but it can be a lot of fun if you approach it with the right strategy and mindset. In fact, rebranding can—and should—be one of the most exciting and rewarding initiatives your firm will undertake. You’ll uncover opportunities you never knew existed. And you will give your team, your clients, and your prospects a whole new reason to believe again.

Free Resource

The Rebranding Guide for Professional Services Firms

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The post Rebranding Strategies: A Step-By-Step Approach for Professional Services appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

What is a Differentiator?

A differentiator is a characteristic of your firm that separates you from key competitors and gives you a perceived advantage in the eyes of your target audience.

How to Evaluate a Differentiator

To be successful, a differentiator must meet three important criteria:

• It must be true. You can’t simply make it up.
• It must be important to potential clients. If not, what’s the point?
• It must be provable. If you can’t demonstrate that it is true, it won’t be believed.

The sad reality is that most differentiators fail on at least two of these criteria. But take heart. There are many successful differentiators.

21 Top Differentiators for Professional Services Firms

Here are 21 that work for many professional services firms. And remember, you can have multiple differentiators. They can be combined to create a powerful competitive advantage.

1. Specialize in an industry.

This is perhaps the easiest and most successful differentiator for most firms. Clients value the specialist in their industry. But be careful. If you try to specialize in too many industries, you will lose credibility.

2. Specialize in serving a specific role within your client’s organization.

This role-based specialization is also quite successful, especially if combined with an industry focus. If you head IT at a law firm, it’s comforting to know that your service provider specializes in helping people just like you.

3. Specialize in offering a particular service.

This is also quite successful, especially if the service you specialize in is rare and hard to find. But beware, unique service offerings can quickly become mainstream. Witness Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or social media marketing as two recent examples.

4. Offer a truly unique technology or process.

By truly unique, we do not mean your process that starts with assessment and ends with monitoring results and making adjustments. We mean an approach that is a whole different way of approaching the problem that offers a unique benefit to the client.

5. Focus on understanding a particular target audience.

A key differentiator for some firms is their in-depth understanding of a particular audience. Your firm might specialize in marketing to Baby Boomer women. Your clients might be retirement planners, insurance companies, or clothing retailers, for example.

6. Specialize in serving clients of a certain size.

This is a common differentiator, although some folks don’t think of it as such. Perhaps you work exclusively with the largest companies in the world. Contrast that with a firm that focuses on solo practitioners. Either firm could have a competitive advantage over the firm that serves clients of all sizes.

7. All of your staff shares a specific characteristic or credential.

Everyone feels like they have a great team. So it’s tough to make that stick as a differentiator. But what if all of your programmers hold PhDs in Computer Science? That is both provable and meaningful to a potential client. Or perhaps all your project managers are PMPs. Not as distinctive, but also provable and relevant.

8. Specialize in clients that share a common characteristic.

This differentiator is focused on a characteristic of your clients other than their industry or role. Let’s say you provide accounting and tax services for expatriates.  They might be from any country, in any industry or any corporate role, yet you will have a competitive advantage.

9. Focus on solving a specific business challenge.

Here, the spotlight is not on the client as much as on the nature of the business challenge they are facing. To work, it must be a challenge that is easily recognized and tough to solve without specialized skills and experience. Helping firms secure their first government contract is an example.

10. Have one or more individuals who are Visible Experts® in their fields.

This is a time-tested strategy that works very well. Having the country’s top expert in your specialty is a very powerful competitive advantage. Many firms have been built on this differentiator alone. Add multiple high visibility experts and you will have a compelling and very valuable brand.

11. Offer a unique business model.

Everyone in your profession bills by the hour, but you offer a fixed fee. Voilà, a perfect differentiator is born! A unique business model can be both meaningful and easy to prove. But be watchful. If it works well, you are likely to accumulate imitators.

12. Have a specific geographic focus.

This is a very traditional differentiator that is losing some of its punch as technology and common business practices are making geography less important. But take heart, it can still work in situations where local knowledge or face-to-face interaction is vitally important to clients.

13. Offer access to a unique set of information not available elsewhere.

Sometimes, access to certain information can be very valuable to potential clients. Do you have benchmarking data that no one else possesses? Some firms have built very valuable practices around proprietary data not easily duplicated.

14. Offer a unique set of contacts or relationships not easily accessible.

While the previous differentiator focused on information, this one is focused on relationships. Public relations firms have long used relationships with reporters and editors as differentiators. What relationships can your firm bring to the table?

15. Do business with a distinctive level of service.

In most cases, offering good client service is simply the price of entry. Everyone does it, or claims to. So to become a differentiator, your level of service really has to truly stand out. Can it be done? Indeed, there are still some physicians who make house calls.

16. Distinguish yourself by the clients you have.

Having an impressive client list is a plus for many firms. But what if you take it further? Some firms differentiate themselves based on their client list. For example, if your firm serves the higher education market and your clients are Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, you have a differentiator.

17. Focus on the size of your firm.

We are the largest…fill in the blank. Size sends a signal that you are doing something right in the minds of many potential clients. This combines nicely with a specialization to show both relevance (the specialty) as well as success (the largest). Find a niche and dominate it.

18.  Emphasize your relationship with a parent firm or partner.

A close relationship with a parent firm can be a limiter (potential clients may feel like you cannot be objective about other technologies for example). But for other potential clients, it can be a big asset. Who knows the ins and outs of the technology better? This same differentiator might also be applied to situations where your firm is a value-added partner rather than a subsidiary.

19. Focus on a notable signature accomplishment.

Some firms can build a strong brand based on achieving a notable accomplishment. Firms that invented a technology or solved a highly visible problem for a very well-known client are good examples. This type of notoriety can be leveraged throughout the industry and over time.

20. Specialize in producing a unique or very valuable result.

Similar to number 9, where you focus on a notable business challenge, this differentiator focuses on a valuable result. The key difference is that you may need to overcome multiple business challenges to produce a valuable result. For example, you might specialize in turning average growth clients into high-growth firms. This could involve solving a wide range of business challenges, rather than a single one.

21. Look or act differently than all of your competitors.

Most professional services firms tend to look and act a lot like their competitors. Why? Perhaps you have been in the industry for a long time. Or perhaps doing things very differently feels risky. We see this all the time. Well, a very different look and feel can be a powerful differentiator for this exact reason. Combine this with other differentiators and you have the makings of a robust competitive advantage.

There you have it, 21 differentiators that have proven to pass the three hurdles that every differentiator must clear. And remember, these can be combined in ways that make your firm unique in a way that no single differentiator can.

Free Resource

The Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms

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The post Top 21 Examples of Key Differentiators for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.