Branding is about more than your logo, brochures and letterhead, it’s about the personality of your firm and how you present yourself to the outside world. All sorts of things impact on your brand, with one of the most powerful being your people and their attitude and approach.
Going beyond design considerations branding is much more fundamental to your businesses. Your approach to recruitment and staff retention; service standards and client care; training and development; processes and procedures; and pricing all impact on your brand image. So to create a strong brand your business operations need to be consistent with your declared brand attributes. By way of example, it is hard to promote a firm as ‘commercial and client focused’ if they make no effort to understand a client’s businesses and never asks clients for their email address. With branding it is about ‘walking the talk’.

What makes your firm different?

A strong and consistent brand can give you a competitive advantage by differentiate your firm from competitors. However to understand how you firm is different requires some soul searching.

What we at Conscious Solutions recommend is a brand evaluation/ audit. This would involve one our Marketing Support Consultants interviewing a range of people in your firm, from the managing partner to the IT specialist and receptionist, in order to understand the personality of the firm, its values and the way it works. We would also look at all your marketing collateral and the presentation of different correspondence with clients from initial quotes to final bills.

As part of the audit we will also include some competitor analysis, focusing on their service range and approach, as well as their marketing collateral.

Once the evaluation is complete we will be able to recommend possible brand attributes and values and suggest how you can present these ideas to the firm s a whole and gain buy-in from partners and staff.

Introducing a new brand image

With their experience of law firm re-brands and mergers, our Marketing Support Consultants can help you with the smooth introduction of a new brand identity.

In any partnership reaching agreement on brand attributes and values probably won’t happen overnight, but once there is consensus then it’s time to talk to designers about the creation of a visual identify for your brand.

Our Marketing Support Consultants can work with you to produce a design brief, as the tighter the brief the easier it is for a designer to meet your expectations. If as part of the new brand image you are considering a new logo, it is really important for the designer to understand how this will be used from your letterhead and website to signage and cheques.

Once the new look is sorted the next stage is developing a project plan for its introduction across the firm. Careful planning is required to minimise the amount of old stock that is wasted, whilst ensuring that all new stock is ready for rollout on the same day. It’s also important to have a communications plan in place to explain the new brand identify to clients and staff and maximise this PR opportunity. Full project management can be provided by one of our Marketing Support Consultants. They will include liaising with printers and website designers as well as your in-house staff.

Our design team

Although most people associate Conscious with websites, it’s not the only thing we do; we also produce a wide range of print-based literature for our legal clients. Within our team of three designers, one is dedicated to working with our clients on print projects:

• Letterheads, compliment slips, business cards and corners
• Brochures
• Advertisements
• Flyers
• Branded marketing items (e.g. umbrellas, memory cards, golf balls)
• Newsletters
• Seminar invitations
• Surveys

Our designers have helped many legal firms refresh their brand and in some cases delivered complete rebrands.