As a strategic topic, branding has come a long way in modern professional service firms since the days when a periodic logo update was considered sufficient. But it’s still a bit opaque and often comes wrapped in alienating jargon that confuscates rather than informs. It needn’t be.

Big picture stuff

These days, the leadership teams of the most successful global firms are clear that the firm’s brand is a critical strategic asset that they need to actively manage. It’s perhaps the most valuable asset a firm owns.

However, despite acknowledging its importance, branding can still be somewhat bewildering for leadership team partners who invariably become leaders because they are excellent practitioners of whatever their firm does – not marketing and branding.

Every successful brand that has ever been, or ever will be, is made up of the same three ingredients: truths, wants, and differences.

As the CMO engaging such a leadership team, it’s useful to get them to take a step back and take a 35,000 ft view of the ingredients of every good brand before getting too far into the details and analysis of your firm’s particular brand.

Power of three

One simple but effective way to do this is to use this framework: every successful brand that has ever been, or ever will be, is made up of the same three ingredients: truths, wants, and differences.

From the most iconic global brands to the latest startups — across all sectors, including professional services, if you look closely at any well-positioned brand, its narrative is woven out of these three fundamental particles.

Truths – what it does really, really well

Wants – what its customers really, really want

Differences – what spark of uniqueness it possesses

The power of branding is that it weaves a single-minded brand narrative through all three of these simultaneously and positions your brand at the intersection.

That doesn’t mean all brands are the same — far from it. Just as you, me, a chair, and the planet Jupiter are all very different — but all made up of the same three particles: electrons, protons, and neutrons — so the three ingredients of every brand combine in myriad ways.

You can apply this framework to analysing and developing successful brands in any sector, including professional services.

Think Different

Apple is always a good example of anything in branding and a perfect case to illustrate the three fundamental particles:

Truths — Steve Jobs’s mantra of “insanely great products” translated into a passionate obsession with quality and innovation from day one of Apple. The stories are well documented — from the hugely ambitious concept of ‘a thousand songs in your pocket’ (iPod) to the specification of a new kind of iPhone ‘gorilla glass’ that didn’t even exist at the time — Apple set out to raise the bar on quality and innovation in technology from day one and was never satisfied with, or limited by, market norms or ‘good enough.’

Wants — Apple isn’t a mass-market product; it’s a premium, high-spec, high-price brand. But despite there initially being tons of pressures to meet the market in the middle — and compete head to head with the other computer and phone manufacturers, Apple’s insight was that there was a big enough group of customers who would be prepared to pay a considerable premium for essentially a similar product in terms of the fundamental product features, as long as they believed it was the absolute best on the market.

Whether by luck or by judgment, Apple realised that as disposable incomes rose, first in the West and then globally (at least for the middle classes), people could afford to pay hundreds, even thousands of pounds/dollars/yen more for their products – if they really, really wanted to.

“the only difference with Microsoft is they just have no taste.”

Differences — in a word, Apple’s difference is in design. Not superficial design — graphics and colours — but a fundamentally design-led approach to technology that was at first unique and even decades later is still illusively tricky for competitors to copy.

In a 1995 interview with PBS, Steve Jobs talked about the difference between Apple and Microsoft, saying that “the only difference with Microsoft is they just have no taste.”

Call it good taste or good design, throughout its history – initially inspired by Jobs and then institutionalised in the culture – Apple has always applied a deep focus on the design and usability of its products in a way that its customers loved and its competitors couldn’t match.

Think difference

You can apply this framework to analysing and developing successful brands in any sector, including professional services.

Truths – what does your firm do really, really well? Where do you have genuine strengths and cutting-edge capabilities?

Wants – what do clients believe they really want that will help them succeed? What are the ideas, expectations, and perceptions that sit in their heads?

Differences – what makes you uniquely better placed than your competitors to deliver and worth paying a premium for?

The first two, truths and wants, are all about strategy in that they are a lot to do with data-driven and insight-based choices and decisions made.

To be a successful brand, you need a strand of difference.

Truths are about building a powerful offer — being dammed good at something. Not uniquely good though. Monopolies aside, it’s impossible to be uniquely good at anything anymore. It’s also nigh on impossible to be dammed good at lots of things.

That’s where the idea of strategy being about ‘choosing what not to do’ comes in and, as I’ve covered previously, a notoriously difficult discipline for leaders of professional service firms to adopt.

The branding challenge in defining your firm’s truths is balancing authentic and credible focus with an inevitable desire to include as much of the firm’s capabilities as possible.

Differences are often more about culture than pure strategy.

Wants are about understanding your market intimately and anticipating where it’s going so that your ‘truths’ are in high demand and worth paying a premium for.

This is a critically important component of any brand and business strategy but also another elusive place to look for sustainable differentiation because everyone has access to the same clients and market intelligence.

Here the brand challenge is to find the right brand narrative that connects with your clients as they see things from their perspective, not yours.

Often that means focusing on benefits rather than features.

Differences are often more about culture than pure strategy, at least at the source. Often, genuine differences have deep roots going right back to the foundation of a brand — in the case of a professional services firm, often going right back to its founders even when they have long since passed:

McKinsey’s obsession with ‘rigour’, Goldman’s ‘uncompromising’ approach, and Wachtell’s ‘port in a storm’ idea.

One of the challenges of sustaining a potential source of differentiation like this once the founders have left the firm is identifying and ‘bottling it.’

Founders do not need to define it; they just ‘live it.’ But subsequent leaders, even if they grew up with the firm, often need help spotting and capturing the difference and making it relevant to the world as it is today.

It’s a remarkably simple and robust framework for dissecting a brand into its components.

Find your own field

To be a successful brand, you need a strand of difference to combine with the other two ingredients. Without it, you’ll be positioning yourself as just one more firm in a ‘field of many’ rather than a ‘field of one.’

Try it out as an exercise with your leadership team. Whether with your firm’s brand, some of your competitors, or any brand you come across.

It’s a remarkably simple and robust framework for dissecting a brand into its components. It is particularly useful in helping separate the important but inevitably more similar components (truths and wants) from the secret sauce (differences).

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