Man Bites Dog

Top 50 law firm, Mills & Reeve, has appointed Man Bites Dog, the service economy communications specialists, to manage its PR retainer.

Man Bites Dog will be providing thought leadership and media relations consultancy to cement Mills & Reeve’s position as a leading national law firm.

The retainer was won following a competitive pitch. Clare Granville will lead the Man Bites Dog team working with Mills & Reeve.

Julie Mortimer, Mills & Reeve’s Marketing Director, said: “We were very impressed by Man Bites Dog’s fresh approach, creative ideas, chemistry and depth of understanding. Having come from all walks of life, the team’s eclectic array of skills and experience gave us confidence that they would be able to deliver against each of our sectors, conceiving and implementing single, cross sector and firm wide campaigns.”

Claire Mason, Managing Director of Man Bites Dog, commented: “We’ve built a solid reputation for our legal communications capabilities and look forward to working alongside Mills & Reeve to elevate the firm’s communications.”

Schneider Foreign Exchange, the independent currency broker, has appointed professional services PR specialist Man Bites Dog to handle its communications in the UK.

Schneider provides commercial foreign exchange services to FTSE-listed companies, financial institutions, corporates, SMEs and private individuals and is consistently rated by Bloomberg as one of the most accurate forecasters of exchange rates worldwide.

The six-figure appointment will see Man Bites Dog take responsibility for delivering a tailored communications strategy to promote Schneider’s commercial forex expertise to the UK corporate and not-for-profit community.

Shelton Fray, Director at Schneider Foreign Exchange, comments: “We have been very impressed by Man Bites Dog’s creative ideas and proactive approach to demonstrating our expertise. They’ve already made a significant impact among our target media.”

Claire Mason, Managing Director at Man Bites Dog, comments: “We’re proud to be working with one of the world’s most accurate commercial forex forecasters, at a time when currency issues are front page news and of critical relevance to business and the wider economy.”

“Seven in 10 managers working harder 10 years ago”
“UK firms face £2.2bn customer drought”
“75% of City workers believe divide between rich and poor is too big.”

The words ‘survey’ and ‘fatigue’ are increasingly heard in close proximity. But a five-minute scan of the headlines on any given day will reveal an enduring media appetite for research-based stories.

Even at a time when the news, business and political agendas are dominated by unprecedented events, surveys continue to fill column inches, as the headlines above from the past week or so demonstrate.

With so many surveys filling news pages and programmes, it is worth examining which are genuinely robust studies, aligned to an organisation’s sales proposition, and which are simply ‘noise’, providing nothing more than a name-check. For the latter, look no further than the car firm that ran a poll on Christmas gift-wrapping habits.

Showing Not Telling
Intelligently conceived and skillfully designed opinion research can be a highly effective lead generation tool in the professional services space.

Professional services firms operate in fiercely competitive markets, offering almost identical services, experience and expertise. In such a uniform environment, ideas are the only source of differentiation.

Robust research is the tool that validates these ideas. It is the difference between fact and opinion.

Demand Generation
Carefully crafted economic modeling or opinion research can prove a business hypothesis and create a direct call to action for a complex advisory proposition. Robust evidence generates demand for a service by promoting the problems it solves.

We have seen this work time and again in the professional services sphere. Thought leadership campaigns can be designed not only to achieve high impact coverage, but also drive direct business leads for firms offering complex and technical advisory services.

Success Factors
There are three critical factors to creating thought leadership that makes the phone ring: the hypothesis, the research design, and the degree of sales alignment.

• Hypothesis: Thought leadership research must set out to prove a compelling, impactful and original theme that plays to the news agenda at the time. It needs to pass three simple tests journalists instinctively apply to stories: ‘So what?’ ‘Why now?’ and ‘Have I heard this before?’

• Research design: The most critical stage. News hooks have to be designed into the research. The approach must be robust, independent and credible. The sample size needs to be representative. The methodology must be bulletproof.

• Sales alignment: Thought leadership research must be closely – but subtly – aligned with a firm’s sales proposition if it is to make the phone ring. Back to our car firm polling consumers on gift-wrapping habits. What value does that generate in terms of potential sales? How does it drive interest in the car brand in question?

A delicate balance is required. The story needs to promote the problems the firm solves, without overt selling the firm or its services. The aim is to set the news agenda, not promote your own. Another journalist filter applies here: The ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’ test.

Rigorous, original, thought-leading research will always provide media – and target audiences – with something new. Whether or not the media is tiring of the poll, thought leadership remains a highly effective tool for organisations to not only get noticed, but create a powerful call to action and ultimately generate demand.

It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that there has been a significant rise in legal marketing recruitment from adjacent professional services industries, such as accounting and management consulting. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was a promotion on marketing jobs in the legal sector. Something is clearly going on.

This surge is likely due to a number of factors. The Legal Services Act came into force on 6 October, breaking down the barriers to non-lawyers to enter the legal services market. Now, there is a real need for law firms to match the creative and marketing standards of these new competitors, including today’s big business consultancies – many of which are already well-oiled marketing machines.

Business services providers are also increasingly positioning themselves as “trusted business advisors”. This presents a major challenge for typical law firms, characterised by their legal briefings and “traditional” brand image. Marketing and thought leadership in particular will be critical to this makeover. See my previous article legal thought leadership comes of age for the reasons why.

Top recruits from these adjacent industries will bring invaluable insights to these “legal laggards”. At this early stage in the legal marketing revolution, there is a real opportunity for them to raise the bar for integrated marketing and high impact thought leadership campaigns in this sector.

The road to becoming a credible, dynamic business advisor is littered with challenges however. LLP-style decision-making and the general conservative nature of legal businesses will make it hard for marketing revolutionaries to convince partners of the need for change. The business case will need to be couched in terms that are familiar to them, whilst opening their eyes to a new vision for the firm.

Then there are the usual challenges associated with being an early adopter of a new way of working. Not to mention that many firms are starting from a stand still when it comes to encouraging partner participation in business commentary for example. Marketing will need company-wide support for making bold statements, creating IP and reaching audiences through the various online and offline channels available.

It might be early days, but I am convinced that this wave of new legal marketing hires will precede a steady increase in the number of law firms talking about thought leadership and working to differentiate themselves from the business consulting crowd.

One of the biggest challenges facing any professional services firm is cutting through the marketplace clutter to stand out from your competitors. As professional service providers our main asset is our expertise. But this is knowledge that we often share with the competition and standing out from an increasingly congested crowd can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle.

So how do you demonstrate leadership when you’re doing the same thing as your competitors?

Unlike in other industries, uniqueness isn’t as important to potential clients as expertise. So when it comes to professional services it’s the currency of ideas, rather than the individuality of your brand, that’s the main differentiator between companies.

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This is where thought leadership can help. Thought leadership is an invaluable tool that can demonstrate insight by highlighting a problem that your potential client hasn’t even considered, or help to find solutions to a headache they are currently facing. This doesn’t mean that you have to give away the farm, far from it in fact; you merely have to whet their appetite on the issue and demonstrate your expertise along the way.

A good data hook can also transform these ideas into a direct call to action, creating a need for your services by highlighting the extent of a problem that they can solve. For example, at Man Bites Dog we launched global management consultancy Hay Group’s post merger human capital integration practice by proving that 91% of mergers fail due to culture shock. The campaign delivered 8 million euros of business into the practice in a matter of weeks; proving the problem highlighted by the research resonated with a market need.

Taking ownership of these issues from a PR and marketing perspective can help you to set the news agenda and stimulate debate, demonstrating a need for your services as well as your ability to deliver them. It might be a change of tack for companies used to a traditional approach involving advertising or direct marketing; but wouldn’t it better to embrace the currency of ideas and show potential customers what you do rather than simply telling them about it? We certainly think so.