What is Involved to Create a Brand?

In a recent blog Should Lawyers Offer a Brand Creation Service? I explained why I believe IP lawyers ought to consider offering brand creation services to their clients to solve their business problems rather than purely legal ones. 

Let me explain what I mean by a “brand creation service”. People associate brand creation with choosing the brand name and designing the visual identity but first you need to understand the market, what customers want and need, and who the competitors are and what they’re offering. Then you decide positioning. Creating the visual identity comes last.

Small businesses often don’t get help with the marketing part that precedes the visual identity. Yet correctly navigating these issues is what puts them on a stronger footing to succeed in business. So, brand creation goes beyond giving IP advice. I’ve spent the last 3 years getting a deeper understanding of branding. writing the Brand Tuned book, and qualifying as a marketer and brand manager. I developed these additional skills because I wanted to offer a more transformational service than trade mark registration. I now support clients to achieve greater business success, and mentor businesses on branding on the Fempeak platform.

Despite the importance of IP in branding, lawyers’ role in it is quite marginal and is diminishing all the time due to new technologies and the internet. Trade mark registration work is increasingly commoditised, so the writing is on the wall for the IP industry. Richard Susskind, in the ‘End of Lawyers?’, points out that lawyers are fighting against commoditisation and the marginalisation of their legal role by finding new ways to solve their clients’ business problems. That invariably involves developing multi-disciplinary skills.

Other industries are also being disrupted by technology. Therefore, the way clients are buying services is changing too. All the disciplines involved in branding need to adopt a more integrated approach. For example, marketers and designers face their own versions of commoditisation and are seeing the need to move upstream to offer more comprehensive services. Instead of just being a graphic designer or a marketer they’re providing brand strategy services. Yet even the most experienced among them, are missing IP in their brand strategy offering. They’re likely to increase the success of the brands they help create and better distinguish themselves from their competitors if they were to expand their skills to include IP strategy.

Mishcon de Reya is a law firm that has seen the need to adapt to these shifts in society. They’ve integrated their IP offering with branding by introducing brand management services. My own firm now offers brand creation as an alternative option to clients who initially enquire about services, such as trade mark registration.

What drives me is the desire to see more businesses succeed. I want to reduce the number of business failures that are often caused by bad advice. To foster greater business success, I’ve developed the Brand Tuned Accreditation program so lawyers, marketers and designers who are in the front line when early-stage businesses look for services, can learn the multi-disciplinary skills they need in order to support their clients to create better brands. The program is the most time efficient way lawyers and others can pick up best practice in branding and up to date information that includes evidence-based insights into how brands grow. 

I’m offering 3 individual consultation sessions for those who book early. That’s partly because I want early sign ups, but mainly because I want to help lawyers and others to work out how best to apply the knowledge and skills, they’ll learn in the program to expand their service offerings and improve their career prospects. In the process I can hopefully foster greater business success by helping as many people as possible to support businesses to succeed. If you’re potentially interested and have questions just message me and we can arrange a time to speak.