Now is the Time to Clarify Your Professional Services Brand

By Joan Miller and Tony Tiernan

In times of great confusion, everyone longs for clarity. Right now, opportunity and urgency have come together in an unprecedented way. 

Now is the time to clarify what your business stands for, what makes it unique, who it serves, and what value it creates. Now is the time to crystallize your brand story and tell it powerfully.

Your employees and your clients are hungry for that clarity. Without it, your ship has no true compass and you’re at the mercy of the storm.

So, how should you go about defining, rolling out, and sustaining your brand in today’s fraught environment? Who you are determines how you create value, so you should start with these core questions:

? Why does your business exist (beyond making money)?

? What good is it here to do, what value is it here to create?

? Who do you serve (beyond shareholders)? 

? What equips you uniquely to deliver the value the you promise better than anyone else?

We find it helpful when working with our clients to ask “so what?” several times for every answer they give to these questions. The idea is to clarify how what they do ultimately benefits the client, their talent, and society. That will be the North Star that guides their communications, behaviors and much more. 

For the rest of this article, we will assume that we are talking about you and your company.

Develop a brand story

Develop a brand story that you tell your own people, your clients, and society. The story should weave together the answers to the core questions above, to create a narrative that communicates not only the business problem you solve for your clients and why you’re uniquely good at it, but also your guiding beliefs and worldview. For more on this, see here. 

Roll out the brand

Once you’ve developed your brand story, you need to communicate it consistently and over time. This will encompass message development, issue ownership strategy (to guide your investment in thought leadership) internal communications, your website, client case studies as well as recruiting and on-boarding. No matter what the communication vehicle, think about the experience you are delivering to the audience as well as the content. 

Sustaining the brand

One common mistake is to think of the rollout as an event (it’s a campaign, involving multiple communications vehicles and sustained over time). The second mistake is to think of the brand as being preserved in aspic. Your brand story evolves over time, and you need to constantly look for new ways to express it. Regularly gathering feedback from your clients and employees will help you decide when and how your story needs to be adjusted.

Professional services firms often have difficulty describing what they do in clear, simple, client-focused language. We can help you get to the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, and tell a powerful brand story that attracts the right clients and the right talent. 

This current pandemic demands that you revisit and focus on who you are. Once you go through that, you can focus on where to land. The clearer you are about that, the more you can use your core purpose to guide your decisions. Without that, you are just spinning in the wind with no anchor.

Contact either one of us to explore how this can be done at your company.

Joan Miller is a Partner at Blue Dun

Tony Tiernan is President of Authentic Identity, Inc