New Survey Results Do PSF practitioners WANT to market and sell? See the results of our research. Our upcoming surveys: Are Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut? How well do Marketing and Business Development work with other operations, like Finance, IT, HR, Legal and more? PSF Marketing/Business Development Integration – Does it Benefit Clients? News Podcast: The Silver Group's interview with Suzanne Lowe on differentiation and her upcoming book. January 2008. MP3 file Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative™. The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, Rain Today, September 2007 New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Hiring fee-earners who WANT to Market and Sell I'm at the February 2008 Carnival of Trust Pricing: An Elephant in the Professional Services Room? Can PSFs "PSF" themselves? Are you "cup half-empty" on Marketing ROI? See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "What a great newsletter — about the only one I've ever found useful in the marketing space." — Marketing and Communications Director, New York investment firm Recent Issues Five Questions for Eileen Harrington, VP, Marketing, Analysis Group, on the Firm's Web Initiative, January 2008 A Year of Doing Things Differently, December 2007 Doing Things Differently – Using Budgets Proactively to Evolve a Professional Firm’s Marketing Program, November 2007 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

Using Branding in a Professional Service Firm to Escape the "Sea of Sameness"

Have you ever felt that your firm was drowning in a "sea of sameness," barely differentiated from the competition?

This month we talk to Jessica Reiter, Vice President of Strategic Marketing for R. W. Beck, who used that clever term to describe the impetus for the firm to launch a branding initiative that resulted in a new company vision, mission, brand attributes and promise, and ultimately an improved way of doing business.

R. W. Beck, Inc. is a technically-based business consulting firm providing engineering, economic, financial and planning solutions for the energy, water and solid waste industries.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

P.S. Is your firm employing unique marketing and business development strategies or tactics? Are you marketing your firm differently? Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future issue.

Five Questions for Jessica Reiter on Launching a Groundbreaking Branding Initiative

Lowe: Describe a "Doing Things Differently" initiative that is intended to increase your firm's marketplace effectiveness.

Reiter: One initiative that has had an impressive impact on the way we do business is our Brand Program. Our goal was to develop a unified brand strategy that enables and ensures a consistent client experience – through every action, communication, and touch point with our stakeholders. It involves every employee at all levels of the organization. When stakeholders interact with someone from R. W. Beck, we want them to have a consistent experience and image of R. W. Beck and the way we deliver our insights to positively impact our clients.

We define our brand as the promise we make to the marketplace and to each other. It’s everything we do, everything we say. It's our reputation. It's what stakeholders describe, what they feel, what they think, what they experience with R. W. Beck—that's our brand. It's not a marketing program, a slogan or a logo. Our Brand is made up of what we term our “Guiding Principles” – our company vision, mission, attributes, and our brand promise, which is "Mind Powered: Insight with Impact."

Lowe: How did you realize that something different needed to be done?

Jessica Reiter, R. W. Beck

Reiter: We engage past, current, and potential clients to stay in touch, to evaluate the marketplace and to see how R. W. Beck is performing. We have received varied feedback in the past about what we are known for, what we do best, and how we’re different from the competition. As one of hundreds of management consulting and engineering companies, we’re at risk of falling into a "sea of sameness" in the market. When we asked clients how the consulting firms they used differed, we'd hear, "Ya know, you're all about the same."

We knew we needed to elevate ourselves from this "sea of sameness" of consulting firms. We needed to do something that would make a difference to our clients and therefore make a difference for us. Objectives and strategies of our brand program focused on defining and enabling a consistent client experience that would differentiate us from the “sea of sameness.”

Lowe: How did you overcome the obstacles or internal challenges to turn your idea into reality?

Reiter: Change is often a cause for concern. For some people, the immediate knee-jerk reaction was, "Wait a minute, you're changing something, why are we changing?"

It was absolutely imperative to demonstrate the business case by sharing what we learned from our client research. We convinced professionals in the firm that if we wanted to get out of the "sea of sameness," if we wanted to do something better and different for our clients, and really excel as a firm, this is what we needed to do. But, we couldn't do it individually, or inconsistently. We'd have to come together as a team and have one voice, one reputation in the marketplace.

With any change you need to make people comfortable and educate them so they are active and positive participants in the process. And with brand programs at professional services firms, it's all about getting your employees, every single one of them, from interns to the CEO, to understand, embrace, and enable what you need to accomplish.

Lowe: What's the status of your “Doing Things Differently” initiative now, even if it’s not finished yet?

Reiter: We kicked the program off at the end of 2006, and it's been hard work but very successful and exciting. For the development phase of the program we worked with an outside strategy consulting firm.

The first step was to talk with our past, current and potential clients, and industry influencers. We did our research. Then to get things started internally, I built a program team. Called the Brand Council, the team included our executive level (CEO, CFO and executive vice presidents). It was crucial to have them on the development team because it got buy-in from the top; and it quickly established excitement and interest at all levels.

When we were ready to share progress with our employees we launched an internal brand education program. We focused on helping employees understand what they can do differently in their jobs to really live the brand. We encouraged employees to be active participants, from program development to implementation. We included all 600+ employees in over 25 different locations, including Singapore.

Our internal rollout included in-person facilitated lunch meetings, online e-learning modules, html emails, posters, packets and handouts, and even fun contests to get people engaged and excited. Our lunch meetings would have themes – Chinese food followed by specially made fortune cookies that we wrote 40 different “brand fortunes” for. My team had fun writing the fortunes – things like “It’s not the size of the firm, but the brawn of the brand” and “You were born to be a brand role model.” We would ask people to read their fortune and describe the meaning. We also promoted participation at the meetings with Starbucks gift cards, crisp $20 bills, and even iPod shuffles with our brand promise engraved on the back. All of this has made for some very fun, interactive sessions, fantastic participation, great prizes and effective learning!

The real goal of all of these internal programs was to guarantee that every employee understands, embraces, and can deliver on our brand promise. In order to deliver our brand promise externally, you have to be certain that internally every employee gets it. External implementation has been more natural, because it's about each one of us living our brand and delivering on our brand promise. There won't be a big external launch campaign. We'll just do it.

Our brand program has led to so many things. We've started new project manager training and we're updating all of the standards of practice. We have new leadership training and have started what we’re calling “Beck University.” We also have "new language," a new visual identity, new graphic elements and concepts that we use to portray ourselves. We started rolling this out externally in late 2007, and we'll continue throughout 2008. We are making some changes to our performance review process and compensation system that will promote accountability and will reward employees for delivering on our brand promise.

All of these things help our employees be exceptionally successful at what they do. As you know, in professional services, you're delivering the people.

Lowe: What advice would you give other professional service marketers who want to Do Things Differently?

Reiter: My advice is to always remember that the client is at the center of your business. In professional service organizations, everything begins and ends with your clients – every initiative should have an end goal of providing value for the client. It's crucial that you are truly invested in your client's success so they consider you a trusted advisor and partner.

Secondly, when you discover that there is something you want to change internally in your firm, you have to do your homework, and then start at the top. Bring information to your executive leadership and say, "Here are the facts." You're not there to tell them what; you're there to tell them why. You need to answer that "So what?" question.

Finally, to be a successful professional services marketer, remember that business is ultimately about people. Foster personal connections with stakeholders. Collaborate with them to solve problems. Engage those you work for and with by thinking out of the box and daring to be different. It makes an impact, and people remember that.

Your feedback is important to us. Please contact us with your comments and questions.

Call for interview subjects: Do you know of a professional service firm that is taking steps to integrate its marketing and business development functions and would be willing to be interviewed for Suzanne’s upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™? If so, please direct them to our page on The Integration Imperative™ for more information.

Take the confidential, web-based Marketplace Masters professional service firm differentiation assessment test for instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation right.

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