10 Brand Development Blunders: A Guide for Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Whether you are developing a brand new brand (a brand launch) or updating and repositioning an existing firm (a re-branding), there are several common blunders that can cost you dearly. Falling prey to them can kill the effectiveness of your brand development efforts and waste precious time and money.

Let’s begin with a definition of brand development.

Brand Development Defined

Brand development, as we use it here, is the process of creating or updating a professional services brand. It typically involves three phases.

• Getting the brand strategy right. The opening phase often involves client and target audience research, brand positioning, and brand or messaging architecture.
• Building the brand. In this phase, a firm develops a new identity and business development tools, such as a name, logo, tagline, stationary, website, marketing collateral, proposal templates, and a content marketing strategy.
• Rolling out the newly developed brand. Here, marketing plans, internal staff training, and a wide range of promotional techniques are brought into play to increase the visibility of the brand with target audiences (from potential new clients to referral sources and prospective new hires).

The brand development process can be daunting. The payoff is huge and the costs are significant, so the stakes are high. All the more reason to avoid costly blunders. Here is my list of the top 10 mistakes:

Top 10 Brand Development Blunders

1. No differentiators. If there is no difference between what you say about your firm and what competitors say about their firms, you have a weak brand. Unfortunately, this can have a negative impact on your firm's growth and profitability. High growth firms are more likely to have a clear, easy-to-understand differentiator. Here is a quick test to see if you have a true differentiator: Think of some way you believe your firm is different, then ask if a potential competitor could ever say the opposite. If the answer is “no,” it is probably not a good differentiator. By the way, having great people and offering great client service don’t pass this test.

2. Trying to be everything to everyone. This typically results in being nothing special to anyone. Many firms head in this direction because they believe that offering more services creates more opportunities. In fact, they are making it much more difficult to attract new business. Having a clear focus or specialization is another attribute of high growth firms.

3. Failure to understand what a brand is. Your brand is not you name or logo or mission statement. It is more about how the outside world (especially potential clients or employees) sees you. Think of it as your reputation. Another dimension of brand is how visible you are in the marketplace. Together, these two elements — reputation and visibility — comprise the essence of your brand. Brand is critical to the value of your firm and drives your ability to grow and be profitable. This leads directly to the next blunder.

4. Not realizing that your brand is your most important asset. With a strong brand, a firm can replace people, modify service offerings, or even change client segments with the full expectation that they can continue to enjoy success. The firm can be bought and sold on the strength of its brand in the marketplace. A professional services brand can be a tremendously valuable asset and should be treated as such. Failing to invest in brand development is short sighted and costly in the long run.

5. Branding in a blindfold. Let’s face it, we all think we understand our clients and competitors. But we’re usually wrong — dangerously wrong. In virtually every research study we conduct into our clients, we find that internal staff and partners have a distorted view of what their clients really think. A recent study showed that firms that conduct systematic research on their target clients grow faster and are more profitable.

6. Making brand development a battleground for other issues. Sadly, many firms turn brand development into a battleground over the future of the firm. For instance, a simple logo decision can become a protracted battle over unresolved issues. Brand development is difficult enough in its own right. Don’t burden it with unresolved issues around firm direction or control. 

7. Aiming too low. Good brands are both real and aspirational. They stand for something that people can get behind and support. Try to be the leader in something or you offer little reason for a prospect to choose your firm over another.

8. Making a promise you can’t keep. The flip side of aiming too low is offering a brand promise that you can't deliver on. Overpromising will cost you credibility and trust. There is a fine line between being aspirational and being unrealistic. People will forgive you for aiming high and falling short of perfection if you are better than others. But if you are aiming high but only deliver a mediocre product, don’t expect much understanding. (You can read more about your brand promise here.)

9. Forgetting online branding. The world of professional services is changing. People are learning about your firm in ways they never did before. Don’t make the mistake of focusing on traditional approaches to branding while ignoring online marketing's growing role in brand development. The future of branding is digital, so plan for it in your strategy, brand building and rollout.

10. The me too mistake. Fitting in with the rest of your competitors is not a sound strategy: "They use blue, I’ll use blue." "Every government contractor has a flag and a capitol dome, so I should too." While adopting attributes of your competitors may feel safer, it is actually playing with fire. It's hard enought to tell most professional services firms apart. Don’t make it worse on your prospective clients. If you can’t be completely different, at least look and sound a bit different. It won’t hurt, and it will probably make your firm easier to recognize and remember.

As you retool your firm for the future, try to avoid these 10 brand development blunders. Your firm's prospects look better already!

For more information and tips, check out the branding kit below.