Brand Strategy & Management

A firm’s brand is a fundamentally valuable and therefore important asset. It is that important that how existing or potential clients, employees or partners, or other influencers view a firm’s brand ultimately determines that firm’s success or failure. Despite its strategic importance and value, we invariably find brand is the most under-managed, little understood asset of a firm, thereby ensuring its true potential is never realized. As a result, brand is too often delegated for attention and management to the ‘marketing’ or similar department with little or no influence or involvement from leadership. This should not be so.

Brand impacts everything in a firm and is influenced in some way by just about every interaction or activity that takes place in a firm. Brand goes to the very heart of an organization and reflects how that organization is designed, how it functions, how it influences other individuals, and how it delivers service from top to bottom, inside and out. Brand therefore needs understanding. It needs creativity and innovation. It also needs strategic leadership and management.

There are three principal types of brand law firms need to be concerned about: the organizational brand, the employment brand and individual brands. Each of these brands rely on and influence one another.

A firm’s organizational brand is how an aggregate of other individuals view or feel about the firm as an organization and not what the partners or marketing department think it is or portray it as (see “Law Firm Brand Success calls for Leadership, Education and Structure” for further insights).

A firm’s ‘brand offer’ is an important concept. This is the combination of the many things the firm puts out into the market as its offer to that target market. If the firm delivers on what it offers or promises to deliver, it generates trust which is foundational to developing brand loyalty. (See “Online Reputation Management for Professionals and their Organizations” for further insight).

At Edge we:

• help clients and their partners and staff to develop a full understanding of brand and its role and importance to every firm;

• assist firms to themselves build and strengthen their brands;

• guide firms in developing appropriate brand strategies, to implement these and get measurable results from them, constantly monitoring progress, tweaking the strategies and moving to new levels of understanding and achievement;

• assist firms to aim high in the area of brand; to seek to build charismatic organizational, employment and individual brands. This is no easy feat but is the ultimate achievement.