Back

Print



Seven thoughts from “What’s your big idea?”

Kim Tasso reports on the PM Forum’s 12th annual global conference which took place in London in September.

Why do we go to conferences? Is it to be reassured (that we are doing OK compared to others), educated (taught about new developments), stimulated (moved to do things) or taken out of our comfort zone? Or maybe it’s just for some time away from the relentless demands of the office where we can listen to others and spend a few moments actually thinking about things. Or to catch up with old friends.Well,at the PM Forum Annual Conference – one of the few compulsory annual dates for professional service marketers – we got a little of each.

There were seven key messages that I took away from the conference:

  1. There are law firms that are doing some very smart marketing – both in terms of product development and in sophisticated branding and communications.

    This thought came to me during one of the eight workshops while I was entertained by Mark Beese, the ‘marketing guy’ from Holland & Hart which is a 14 office mid-Western US law firm. In addition to having developed some pretty neat and innovative ‘packaged’ products (such as a trademark registration risk assessment) he talked us through a fabulous co-branding communications programme with one of the firm’s airline clients (Frontier).They produced some in-flight business news programmes that, you got it, profiled their most innovative clients. Awesome.


  2. Regular electronic exchanges with my ‘internet generation’ teenage son does not mean that I am future-proofed on technology shock

    In another workshop I heard from David Jabbari what Allen & Overy are doing in terms of providing on-line tools to internal ‘communities’ of lawyers so that they share knowledge and create new insights. His copresenter, Lee Bryant from Headshift, is one of those amazing new breed of people (he calls himself an ‘on-line social communication specialist’) who you can listen to for hours as he enthused to the point of being evangelical about blogging tools, wiki platforms and newsfeeds supporting collective intelligence creation. I felt like iron age woman when I remembered Lotus Notes being used for knowledge management so this session had the ‘wow!’ factor for me and when he got to ‘attention metadata’ I was deliriously out of my comfort zone!


  3. Remember that truly great marketing means looking into the heart of your proposition and finding the one key value that defines and differentiates your brand

    Whilst one or two of the delegates didn’t connect with Sarah Watson from Bartle Bogle Hegarty advertising agency as she was pure mainstream consumer advertising, I was amongst the majority who found great inspiration from her talk about ‘the importance of ideas to an advertising agency’. Maybe it was the enormous passion for her agency, her work and her clients that was so inspiring. Or maybe it was the eye-catching ‘black sheep’ logo. Or maybe it was watching some world class adverts for such iconic products as Audi, Levi, Lynx and Johnnie Walker. Or maybe it was the admission that whilst they had lots of processes for managing campaigns and developing great client relationships and work, they had no process for generating ideas – just lots of smart people working really hard on client problems with a shared vision of excellence. And her ideas about a ‘culture of restlessness’ seemed like a great antidote to the ‘culture of complacency’ that exists in many professional service firms.


  4. You can turn the unfortunate accident of failing to quickly sell off your consultancy arm like all your competitors into a point of differentiation when the regulatory storm blows over.

    Having worked at the forerunner of Deloitte (it was called Touche Ross Management Consultants some 20 years ago) I have always had a soft spot for the firm. So it was a treat to listen to Mark Allatt (who must be the leading expert on brands in professional service firms) talk us through the long programme of internal engagement and branding there. It was reassuring too that he admitted it took many years to persuade the senior management there to sign up to the £350,000 Victoria & Albert Leonardo da Vinci exhibition sponsorship and a similar time frame to get them to agree to the £2m advertising campaign that broke in March this year in a multi-media campaign that included iconic London poster sites, regional train stations, national, regional and business press and on-line.

    Another ‘reassurance’ moment emerged during discussions with one of the exhibitors at the conference,Acuigen (‘leading customer intelligence’), who described how big firms like Addleshaws and Eversheds were using sophisticated telephone and electronic client satisfaction assessments which they can interrogate by individual lawyer, by team or by office. Neat. Except I know that the residential conveyancing team at a 15 partner practice Rix & Kay down in East Sussex does the same AND goes one step further by getting estate agents to rate them on-line on some different measures after each transaction as well.There was a third reassurance point during the plenary session by Professor Marius Leibold who presented an insightful analysis demonstrating that despite all the accumulated brainpower at the world’s leading business schools – even they didn’t always get their thought leadership marketing right!


  5. Just how many thought leaders (‘engaging prospects and customers with new, proprietary insights’ – Paul Dunway, Bearing Point) does the market need?

    Andrew Hedley asked this question at the first plenary session of the day and it echoed throughout the day. It’s a good point. So many firms attempt to be thought leaders (or use it to justify dodgy marketing communications programmes) – through commissioning research and putting their experts onto platforms – yet how many are really leading thought? It was brave of Allen & Overy to admit, at one of the workshops, that there were probably only 20 people in their global firm that were truly insightful. So if there are really so few real thought leaders, what’s the best market positioning for the rest of the firms? Something to ponder.


  6. PSL (Professional Support Lawyers) might one day rule the world

    Well, not quite. But they just might wrestle away some of the most important bits of strategic marketing if we are not careful. For their inherent advantage of in-depth product knowledge combined with responsibility for managing legal knowledge (the stuff of future products) and proximity to clients (the foundation of strategic client relationships) makes a powerful combination. Whilst there is no direct equivalent of Professional Support Lawyers in accountants and surveying practices, there are others who play similar roles that are outside the marketing domain.


  7. Whilst it sometimes appears that marketing folk are easily diverted by all sorts of interesting ‘sidelines’ in their firms – coaching, leadership, databases, knowhow groups – innovation is actually pretty fundamental.

    Marketers need innovation. Innovation in analysing and segmenting markets. Innovation in anticipating client needs. Innovation in developing new products and services. Innovation in pricing structures. Innovation in communication campaigns. Innovation in delivering enhanced value to our clients. So why don’t we spend more time on innovation in professional service firms marketing?

    In Treacy and Wiersema’s dimensions of competence model, it says there are but three routes to success – excelling in operational efficiency, product/service leadership or client intimacy. Information, ideas and innovation are pretty much essential in all these areas and perhaps knowledge management – of which there was much talk – underpins client intimacy strategies in large professional service firms.

Kim Tasso BA(Hons) DipM FCIM MCIJ MBA is a management and strategic marketing consultant and a freelance writer. She may be contacted at kim@kimtasso.com


Back