Brand = strategy made visible

A strong brand narrative and positioning can ignite strategy, align leaders, engage teams, and inspire actions that impact the market.

This is particularly powerful for a professional services firm, where the brand narrative can be an effective bridge between high-level strategy and daily marketing activities, ensuring consistency and coherence across all touchpoints.

What you do is who you are

A confident and successful business doesn’t hide its strategy—it should be visible to all. The organisation’s brand should be the most tangible manifestation of that strategy, leading the charge on transformation to all its audiences, inside and outside.

There are many business school definitions of what makes a good strategy — try googling it — but the best is Michael Porter’s aphorism that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

So, if strategy is choosing what not to do, brand is telling the story of what’s left.

Or, to put it more positively, if a sound strategy requires making sometimes difficult trade-offs on where you think you can win, then a good brand becomes a celebration of the benefits of those difficult decisions.

When an organisation’s brand and strategy are working well together, you should be able to go to their website and after a few clicks know the strategy.

Logos are not brands

These days, the logo is a far less critical part of the brand than it once was. So many channels of communication add or subtract from the brand story—many of which have little or no visual component.

What makes a good brand in this environment is a precise positioning, narrative, and disciplined set of high-level key messages that provide a strong bridge between strategy and marketing.

Look at Apple, Starbucks and Tesla. Their strategies are clear and made visible in their brands. Their strategies are clear because their brands are built on them.

A good brand requires a good strategy, but a good strategy doesn’t always produce a good brand. Too often, they are disconnected, and many firms have vague and squishy brands.

When an organisation’s brand and strategy work well together, you should be able to go to their website and know the strategy after a few clicks.

If you can’t, either the marketing team is detached from the leadership and strategy process, or there is a strategy vacuum, and the marketing team has just gone rogue and made something up.

The discipline of marketing and branding can add real value to a firm’s strategy process

Shining through

In the world of professional service firms, there are some excellent examples of how a distinctive strategy shines through in a firm’s brand communications.

PA Consulting, the innovation company (and a Principia client), is a perfect example of ‘brand = strategy made visible.’ Being a client, I’m under an NDA not to divulge any confidential info, and yet I can easily ‘show’ their strategy because it’s crystal clear in their brand, which you can find all over the place.

The brand concept is ‘Bringing ingenuity to life’, which tells you quite a lot about the strategic choices they’ve made and where they are focused on being the best, in only four words.

Spend a few seconds looking through their website, and it’s clear what they stand for, what kind of work they do, who they do it for, and what they are passionate about.

You can easily imagine that the people who work inside PA Consulting are also clear about their strategy and are well-placed to act in their day-to-day lives to help implement it—the holy grail of achieving strategy ambitions.

Here are some other shining examples in professional services: Quinn Emanuel, the world’s biggest litigation-only law firm, has the brand statement, ‘Litigation is a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. We know how to win.’

They’ve made strategic choices about what not to do, and in their brand, they celebrate the benefits of that strategy for their audiences (clients and recruits).

It won’t surprise you that Quinn Emanuel prides itself on operating differently from other big law firms. They’re known in the recruitment market for their ‘flip-flop’ culture, or “Talent mandatory. Suit optional,” as they put it on their website.

How many strategy papers have you read that contain a shopping list of ‘priority’ services, sectors and geographies?

Another terrific one is Shillings. I don’t even know how to say what kind of organisation they are — they used to be one of many law firms that dealt a lot in legal privacy cases — but in recent years, they’ve transformed themselves with a clear and determined strategy.

They say they are “the only business in the world to deploy – under one roof – intelligence experts, investigators, cyber specialists, risk consultants, lawyers and top people from the military, banking and government.”

And in their brand narrative, they’re celebrating this strategy. They position themselves as the people who will “High stakes, handled.’”

It’s not a service I ever hope to need, but of course, these days, they know that many do. And it’s not difficult to believe that they are the best, or at least one of the best, firms to turn to if you find yourself in a crisis (and the money to pay for it).

Chicken or egg?

If you are reading this and think, “It’s okay for Quinn, PA, and Shillings because they are very focused businesses compared to ours,” I would say that’s the problem with your strategy; it’s too general.

These (and other) firms with clear strategies have also followed the Porter method and made difficult choices and trade-offs. They’ve also ensured that their strategies focus on ‘mass niches’, not simply ‘niches.’

They can do many things to a ‘good-enough’ standard, but they focus on only what they think they can do better than anyone else (for a specific group of clients, at least).

Quinn could easily bolt on other non-litigation departments to leverage their client base. But they don’t because, by doing so, they would lose their differentiation and be one of ten, twenty, or thirty international law firms that do high-stakes litigation.

They also know that the aggressively clear brand proposition that is an absolute asset in litigation wouldn’t work in the more consensual deal-making world of mergers and acquisitions.

They’d be forced to tone it down and add some “we’re also really nice to deal with” messaging. It would be a car crash.

Good branding doesn’t easily allow for that degree of fudge

Brand brings focus

That’s where the discipline of branding can also add real value to a firm’s strategy process — by forcing the discussion to a higher level of abstraction and focus.

How many strategy papers have you read that contain a shopping list of ‘priority’ services, sectors, and geographies?

That’s all too easy in a 20-page document. But good branding doesn’t easily allow for that degree of fudge — unless you go for ‘we put our clients first’ or ‘we’re really good and nice to work with.’

Because it’s a bridge between a 5-year strategy and day-to-day marketing, a serious discussion at leadership level about brand positioning and narrative for your overall firm can create helpful space to tackle some big issues.

Suppose you can gain permission for that conversation within your organisation and develop something like “bringing ingenuity to life”.

In that case, you’ll have added tremendous value to your firm, and your brand will also have authenticity and support from all parts of the organisation.

Supporting the brand is supporting the strategy — your strategy is made visible.