I was fortunate enough to attend a great session hosted by my colleague Charles Cousins at our inaugural CMO Series Live event in London last week. Charles unpicked what makes a successful rebrand at a professional services firm and was joined by the brilliant Julie Stott who is CMO at leading law firm Travers Smith and just so happened to carry out a very successful rebrand.

The session was broken down into three main sections:

Where do you start?

• Identify what the firm wants to be famous for and how it can differentiate itself from other similar firms
• Identify the brand gap.  Look at what the firm currently is and stands for an what your clients think the firm is and stands for.  This gives you the brand gap.

Decisions and challenges:

• Educate partners and fee earners alike on what a rebrand actually is.  The whole brand experience including recruitment and talent.
• Choose a creative agency partner carefully and preferebaly one that totally understands your industry and structure of the firm.
• Build a brand steering group that includes people in all sorts of roles and backgrounds at the firm.
• Build the mother of all project plans.
• Remember this is not a markeing project but a full firm initiative.
• Your success metrics will be quite intangiable.

Getting buy-in:

• Engage with key stakeholders from the outset.  This can be the managing partner and members of the board.
• Look to appease everyone all the way through the process through inclusion.  Senior level all the way down to junior and incude those that are already onboard but also the trickier ones to convert as well.

Julie concluded with the fact that this was not a small or short project.  In fact it took 2 years in total but they have had brilliant recognition and her team at Travers Smith have recieved the ultimate reward through positive internal and external feedback as well as winning multiple awards!