Doubters, Dreamers and Doers
Too often professional services brands are caught up in their own spell. From law firms to global asset managers, the toughest truth to swallow is that your brand isn’t as important to your audience as it is to you.
This is an incredibly challenging point of view to accept.
Witness the number of websites that contain “news” pages, in the belief that their audience are returning to their site on a regular basis to catch up with their latest announcements. The same can often be said for social media posts that parrot the same content as Bloomberg, or worse, generic content about looming recessions. Don’t waste the tiny amount of time that people are looking at you to feed them bland waffle.
Here are some broad facts that people don’t always appreciate about their own brands:
When buyers/investors come across your brand, 95% of them aren’t currently in the market for it.
People are not evaluating your brand in a vacuum, they evaluate them when they’re in a “buying situation”.
For most brands, your most powerful competitor isn’t another brand, it’s actually the status-quo.
So what does this all mean?
The 95-5 Rule
No-one is really looking for you. You have to make them pay attention. But you can’t just make them pay attention and then hope that they become a buyer/investor.
That’s where the 95-5 Rule comes in: 95% of the time, when people see your content they simply aren’t in the market to buy/invest with you at that time. Only 5% of people looking at you are currently looking for your product/service.
In actual fact you need to keep on keeping-on at a consistent pace with a clear and consistent message for as long as you can: you need to be always-on. Because one day, those 95% will be looking for what you have to offer, and you want to be top-of-mind.
Situational Awareness
Secondly, you need to understand the power of situational awareness. If I were to ask you what your favourite coffee shop was, you’d probably have a general idea. But if I added a “buying situation” to that question, such as “what’s your favourite coffee shop for your morning commute?”, you’d give me a different answer.
In my case, it’s a little coffee-van parked outside the entrance to the train station. But I wouldn’t go out of my way on a Sunday morning with my family to stand in the cold and drink his coffee. Situational awareness plays a large part in how people evaluate your brand. Too often brands focus on “awareness”, when they also need to pay attention to “availability”.
The Status-Quo
The third piece to this is understanding the power of status-quo, i.e. doing nothing.
I’ve written in the past about how brands misunderstand that their main competition is not always other brands that offer the same services, but instead it’s other brands that fight for the same “attention”. That’s certainly one aspect. But the other aspect is that you’re competing with people who would rather do nothing. Consider this statistic: 40% of us only change bank account every 10 years. For 20% of us it’s 20 years or more. Personally I opened a bank account on my first day at University in 2002, and reluctantly still bank with them.
Research in behavioural science clearly shows that people will immediately consider what they lose by making a switch. Switching is more emotional than logical and rational.
What should you do?
This is why all brands in the professional services space need to evaluate:
What is your purpose (beyond making money)? Note: this doesn’t need to be some altruistic greater-good purpose. It can simply be: we want to turn mortgage applications into less of a hassle for busy parents with young kids.
What motivates your audience to “switch”? Note: is it bad customer service, price, complexity?
What makes you distinctive? Note: this doesn’t mean different, the truth is that almost nothing in law, accountancy or asset management is meaningfully different. What’s truly different between an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy? Or a Nike pair of running shoes vs Adidas?
How should you consistently express that distinction? Note: how do you need to sound, how do you need to look and where should you be showing up?
There’s a great read on the LinkedIn B2B Institute that ponders: What if Coca Cola was marketed like a B2B product?
I’ve included this image from the blog, titled “The Product Delusion”
It’s laughable, because we all know that Coke would never do this. But we tell ourselves, “Oh that’s a retail tactic. What we’re selling is far more complex, so our brand needs to be complex, too”, despite all the evidence to the contrary showing us how human beings behave, how rarely they switch product/service, and what drives them when they do.
The shift in thinking is coming. 2023 will be a big year for this. Many large players in the professional services game are already way ahead on this (and luckily, we have decades of retail teachings to learn from).
For everyone else there are three types of people:
Doubters – those who don’t yet believe in the power of brand to lead transformational results.
Dreamers – those who do, but think they don’t have the resources (time and/or money).
Doers – those already on the case.
Which one are you?