8 Steps to Creating a Strong Professional Services Brand

As in any business, a professional services firm or organization must win customers' hearts and minds by building a brand that will attract customers to the business.  By taking a strategic approach to define who you are and why customers should do business with you, you can create your brand identity—how you want to be perceived. Once this is in place, the challenge is to align your brand image—how you are perceived—with your brand identity.   Many elements work together to build and reinforce a brand, including marketing communications, customer relationships, quality, and value.

Because a service is intangible, a brand is even more important in the services business than it is in a product business.  The brand represents everything your services business stands for in the marketplace. Without tangible products to present to a prospect, a brand helps convince people of what you can do and how well you can do it. Services are sold on reputation and trust, and a brand helps establish these qualities in the minds of your prospects. You must manage it and make it work for your business.

In addition to attracting prospective buyers, a brand helps attract prospective employees. The more alluring your brand, the easier it is to attract the high-quality consultants whom you need to deliver outstanding services.

In this article, we will present 8 steps to creating a strong professional services brand. At the end of this article, we will also look at some of the unique characteristics of branding a professional services organization in a product company. Let’s begin with the steps to building an effective professional-services brand.

1.  Start with a Clear Positioning Statement

Winning brand strategies start with a well-defined positioning statement that articulates your distinct value to your clients, and how you are different from competitors.  A good positioning statement provides a clear and concise picture of how you want your clients to view your brand.

Your positioning statement should answer:

• Who is your target audience(s)?
• What key problems do your services solve?
• What differentiates your services from competitors?
• What unique benefits do your clients derive from your services?
• Why will prospects believe you can deliver these benefits?

Do the research necessary to develop sound answers to each of the above questions. If you are a new firm, talk to potential customers.  If you are rebranding your firm, talk to your current clients. Ask them about their wants and needs. Determine which needs are most important. Make a list of how your service offerings solve these needs and deliver desired benefits. Compare your solutions to the competitors. Ask your clients about how they view your competitors, and also check out your competitors’ websites and marketing materials.

It is important to invest the time and effort to develop a strong positioning statement. It communicates how you differentiate yourself from your competitors and what makes your firm special. It becomes the foundation to build your brand and create a clear and compelling identity for your firm in the long term.  As your business matures, and new competitors enter your markets, you will need to review the core components of your positioning statement and make some course corrections.  However, in general, your positioning statement should remain fairly constant, serving as a strategic compass for how your brand is represented.

2.  Strive for Total Alignment with Your Positioning

Some people mistakenly think that a brand is about creating a logo and a look and feel for all marketing materials. Having consistent visuals is important, but a brand is so much more. Your brand image is the sum of how all your prospects and clients view your firm and your services. It’s how your clients think about you when they call you for a meeting. It’s how they expect to be treated when they hire your firm.  It’s how they speak about you to their colleagues and partners. It includes the feelings, attitudes, and perceptions your prospects and clients have about your services.

To shape your brand to your desired image, strive for consistency. Once the positioning statement is established, everything else should support it. This includes your firm’s name, your logo, your tagline, benefits of your services, your marketing materials, pricing, and more.  Most important for a professional services firm, every interaction with your prospects and clients—by every individual in your firm—should align with the brand.

3.  Develop a Marketing Architecture to Drive Consistency

To help you achieve consistency across all your outbound-marketing communications, develop a marketing architecture which communicates the key message to each of your primary audiences. For each marketing message, include proof points to add detail and support your message.

Your website, collateral, press releases, and other forms of communication should leverage your messaging and communicate your value to your customers. Create a blog and use the power of other social media such as, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook, to build your brand.

4.  Add a Tagline

In addition to your company name and logo, it is also a good idea to have a tagline that succinctly states how you want to be perceived by your target market. A tagline is part of the brand image and reminds customers about the essence of the company. Most car fans know “The Ultimate Driving Machine” used successfully by BMW for years. Or Federal Express’ “The world on time.” These are catchy, differentiating, and memorable.  

Your PS firm’s tagline should support your positioning, articulate your brand’s promise, and help people recognize and remember you. It should be short and believable. To select a tagline, think about the most significant benefit people achieve when they use your services. Accenture’s tag line is “High Performance. Delivered.” KPMG’s tag line is “cutting through complexity.” Avoid taglines that are generic.  For example, Booz Allen’s tagline “Helping clients succeed” could apply to any consulting firm.

Even if you don’t use a tagline, it is a good idea to select a few words you want people to connect with your firm and use them in all your marketing materials.  For example, Volvo is linked with safety and Jaguar with luxury. In the services world, Boston Consulting Group is associated with business strategy. 

5.  Build Your Brand through Thought Leadership

When you demonstrate thought leadership by holding webinars, speaking at conferences and seminars, writing articles and whitepapers, and providing original research, you help build your brand. All of these approaches include giving something to your customer (e.g., new ideas, thoughts, direction). Customers can gain an appreciation of your consultants’ knowledge and sample the value that you can provide to their company. It is one way to make the intangible tangible. The more complex your services, the more important it is to build customers’ confidence in the consultants delivering these high-end services. 

6.  Deliver the Brand Promise

A consistent brand identity is important, but delivering on your brand’s promise is even more important. A brand promise sets expectations in the customers’ minds. It is your consultants who deliver the services promised and build the company’s brand image—or destroy it. The work of your consultants will enable your brand to communicate quality, reliability, sincerity, integrity, and trust—or not. An excellent branding strategy can reinforce the image created by quality services, but it cannot fix an organization whose services do not measure up to the intended brand image.

Building an image for a professional services organization is similar to building an image for a movie star or an athlete. Brand can create awareness, but in order to maintain a sustainable advantage, the performance of the consultants must be consistent with the expectations set by the brand identity. Brand preference is built during the delivery of the service. Companies who promise more than they deliver do more harm than good.

7.  Promote Your Successes

Delivering on the promise results in happy customers, and happy customers provide referrals. Be sure to capture success stories and share them with prospects. They provide a powerful way to demonstrate your firm’s capabilities. In your success stories, describe the customer’s challenges and your solutions.  If possible, include specific qualitative business results (e.g., enhanced service levels, or improved customer relations) and quantitative business results (e.g., the percent increase in IT staff productivity or the percent reduction in IT costs) that can be attributed to your services. It is also valuable to include short success stories and customer quotes in brochures, service briefs, and press releases. Customer stories are a terrific way to increase credibility and build your organization’s brand.

8.  Live your brand—every day

While the company name, logo, tagline, website and other marketing and promotional materials help to shape any brand, a professional services brand is heavily influenced by the personal interactions between the individuals in your professional services organization and the customer organization. Everyone in the firm must live the brand every day. At a minimum, your consultants need to provide quality services and solutions in your core competencies or areas of expertise. However, in today’s highly competitive environment, perceived value of your services is often not enough.  Customers must perceive the value of the total customer experience. Even if the customer is not able to measure all aspects of technical work, he does know how he feels about your team’s reliability, honesty, integrity, and dedication.  He knows if he feels valued and respected.

It is up to your sales rep, engagement manager, and other people participating in a service to earn customer trust. Interpersonal skills play a key role. How well does your sales team listen to customer needs? Do they convincingly demonstrate expertise in discussions and presentations of potential solution approaches?  How well do your consultants conduct themselves in the customer’s presence? How well they listen, their level of empathy and interest in the customer’s problem, their ability to persuade, how they handle disagreements, and even how they dress influence the sale, repeat business, and your brand.

To help the staff live the brand, many professional services organizations develop customer interaction processes and codes of conduct, and invest in employee training. Every positive interaction with prospects and clients contributes to winning trust.

Winning a customer’s trust leads to more business with the same customer and referrals to new customers. With prosperous organizations, the cycle repeats itself again and again. Satisfied customers provide referrals—and those new satisfied customers provide more referrals. That’s how a PS organization builds a lasting, solid reputation, and that is the proof of a strong professional services brand.

Branding Professional Services in a Product Company

If you are a professional services organization in a product company with an established name, you have an advantage.  Your company already has built a brand in the marketplace. But even though your company is recognized for its products, your professional services organization still needs to build its image as a provider of services and solutions in its core competencies.

In product companies, marketing managers brand the company and key technology or products, or product lines. Yet, many professional services organizations in a product company don’t even have a name for themselves. They have a section on the website under “services” or “consulting”. Your organization simply cannot create an identity or brand image without a name to identify it. No one will believe that your company is serious about professional services if your organization doesn’t even have a name.

Most PS organizations choose a name that leverages their parent company, such as, IBM Global Services, HP Services, or Oracle Consulting. Large organizations create brands for each of the major sub-businesses.  For example, IBM has brands for IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services. Your company must also decide if there will be individual brands for consulting, education, and support services; one umbrella brand for all services, or brands at both levels.

Consider branding your methodology. In addition to branding the organization, some technology professional services teams brand their methodology. A large consulting organization may brand more than one methodology in the same way that a large company brands more than one technology. For example, IBM’s methodologies include IBM Method BLUE for the implementation and management of enterprise applications, the IBM Business Practices Alignment methodology to help businesses align cultures during reorganizations, and more. Some professional services groups also trademark their methodologies, such as KPMG Value Explorer® Methodology, to protect the identity, as well as call attention and give stature to the approach.  

Extend your company’s brand. A brand reflects the soul of the company.  In most product-centric companies, it encapsulates the company’s products. If your company wants professional services to play a strategic role in your corporation, you must extend your company’s brand to include services. Clearly, the IBM brand stands for both products and services. More companies are also transforming product brands to represent the whole product or the total solution—including hardware, software, consulting, education and support, as appropriate.

The “look and feel” of professional services marketing materials—brochures, services briefs, customer testimonials, white papers, websites, and more—must align with your corporate graphic standards. All customer deliverables for services must be easily identified with your company.

Is your brand positioned for maximum effectiveness?  Do your website and other marketing materials reflect your brand?  Do your employees live your brand? Whether you are a professional services firm or a professional services organization in a product company, establishing a positive brand identity, delivering on your brand promise, and shaping your brand image, will significantly contribute to your business success.