The frustration I hear most consistently from CMOs in large multi-national professional service firms is that their marketing activities are spread too thin.

Pulled in too many directions by too many partners with too many micro-campaigns, resulting in strategic marketing objectives getting little or no attention.

The solution is to make your firm’s overall brand strategy the bridge between your day-to-day marketing activities and your firm’s strategic marketing objectives.

The reality for CMOs is that all groups within the business have targets to hit.

Do or not do. There is no try.

I recall a conversation with the Dutch CEO of a highly successful and innovative green energy company. Discussing the intense focus of their strategy–having rapidly pivoted the entire business from carbon-based energy to renewables.

I asked her how she managed to persuade her senior colleagues to go with her on such a focused journey. “Simple,” she said, “I have one huge lever, the investment budget. Areas in the business in line with the pivot strategy get it, the rest don’t.”

If only life in a professional services partnership was so straightforward.

In the vast majority of partnerships those individuals driving strategy, particularly CMOs driving strategic marketing, have no such lever to pull–or at least, a tiny one that pails in significance compared to the overall task.

Everyone’s happy, or so it seems. But what about the strategy?

Everything, everywhere, all at once

The reality for CMOs is that all groups within the business have targets to hit.

All partners in those groups believe that their marketing activities directed at clients in their area should be the number one priority of the firm’s CMO and their marketing team. It’s not an unreasonable position to hold from an individual’s perspective.

Multiply this by 100–or even 500–and you’ve got the sense of a day in the life of the CMO.

Each of these individuals and small groups of partners wants to focus their marketing content and messages around a supremely micro set of issues: their issues.

If they’re focused on the energy sector, it’s this; if it’s automotive, it’s that. If it’s real estate, it’s another set of issues and resulting messages.

The list goes on.

This is where the dark art of brand strategy comes to the fore.

The one true ring?

Everyone’s happy, or so it seems. But what about the strategy?

What if one of the key themes in the firm’s five-year strategic plan is building a profile and reputation in the US? Or to build a new market in the technology sector or global regulatory work?

Or what if the strategy is to move the entire firm’s market reputation up the ‘food chain’ away from commoditised work towards higher-profile, higher-margin work for its clients and prospects?

The frustration CMOs experience is that whilst these strategic ambitions may be extremely high on the list of priorities at the global firm level, they can often be no one’s priority at a day-to-day marketing level.

And that’s where the budgets are.

A review of the firm’s overall brand involves all partners in all locations and all disciplines.

One for all, all for one

This is where the firm’s overall brand strategy has a powerful role to play–building a bridge between strategy and day-to-day marketing.

The discipline of a discussion around the firm’s overall brand reputation and market positioning makes it far easier to surface the strategic issues.

It also makes it easier to develop a plan of action to shift global market perceptions through a range of marketing and other client-influencing channels.

A review of the firm’s overall brand involves all partners in all locations and all disciplines. Because of this, it’s possible to take them on a journey that doesn’t get lost in the weeds of the day-to-day.

In my experience, it’s possible to get them all to agree that a few firm-level brand messages must be integrated into everything the firm does in the market, crucially as part of ‘their’ day-to-day marketing.

And, with care and creativity, it’s then possible to show them what that looks like in practice.

This collective buy-in of hearts and minds makes it much easier for the CMO’s team to co-create activities with partners in all the firm’s different client-facing teams that influence the macro and the micro marketing objectives.

With budgets allocated accordingly.