This year, PricewaterhouseCoopers came seventh in the Best Brands of British Origin study. PwC outranked a range of household UK names such as the BBC, Marks and Spencer and Virgin. The strength and visibility of this very typical professional services brand is not unique – all of the large professional services firms invest heavily in their brand and have done for decades. Still, there lingers some skepticism among small firms about the visual identity part of brands, and, in fact, any kind of marketing other than word-of-mouth. The fear I encounter when networking with owners of small-sized professional services firms is more or less this: “I don’t want to come across as a cheesy sales person, so I’d feel uncomfortable with a website, a fancy logotype, marketing material, anything that markets me to clients in an obvious way. My clients come to me from recommendations.”
However, you’re not afraid of branding. You’re afraid of bad branding and marketing.
This is very understandable. There are so many examples of small- to mid-sized firms which market their offering in a way that will make you cringe. Salesy, pushy and cliche-filled material, pestered with stock images of laptop carrying Ken dolls with light blue shirts. Not unlike if Gucci were to start doing the same kind of ads as a discount hardware store. Or getting into consumer telesales. Basically, you can do it the wrong way, and you can do the wrong things for your line of business. You are right to think that both will destroy your business rather than building it.
Part of the problem, I’d say, is that these firms are in the hands of branding and design consultancies that say they’re experts on every kind of business. Some have, doubtlessly, the expertise and sensitivity to “get” both the world of consumer products and the world of professional services. But others simply apply a consumer thinking to a B2B context, and then add a touch of visual conservatism to get a suitably PS look. Also, these firms have not found an agency that thinks professional services are exciting. There still exists an unfortunate view that professional services are “no fun”, in relation to consumer product brands that can be built with humourous ads, colourful packaging design and viral campaigns featuring, say, giant talking rabbits .Instead find someone who’s excited by the prospect of helping you grow your business, and who knows your line of business enough to be able to find room for creativity, in an appropriate context.
Secondly, you are building your brand the right way – a professional reputation is the foundation for the professional services brand. What the visual part of branding will add to that is mainly a form of emotional support for the potential client, who is perhaps the most frightened of any potential client. She’s about to buy something that doesn’t yet exist, is intangible, highly complex, and that she’s unlikely to be able to accurately judge the quality of. She will be unconsciously looking for clues that tell her that recommendations and your own verbal presentation are correct – you are truly professional, and you’re right for her business. Those clues are largely visual, and as a professional services provider with much fewer touchpoints than within consumer products, each clue counts.
