In Part 1 of this series, we took a look at why now is not the time to abandon your core positioning, chucking out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. If you’ve invested time, energy and cash in creating a stand-out brand then you need to think very carefully about whether you’re protecting it or undermining it by your behaviour.
However, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t keep your positioning strategy (otherwise known as ‘what you want to be famous for’) under review. Why? Because that position or brand doesn’t exist in isolation, but in a marketplace of competitors. That’s why the key thing we discuss with clients when we work on positioning strategy is, “how do you want to be positioned relative to the competition?”
And the competition – and more broadly the market you operate in – is inevitably already changing as a result of this crisis. I remember hearing a presentation in 2008 where the speaker said, “If you are marketing your business the same way in 2009 as you were in 2007, then you are going to be doing something very wrong.” The point is that markets always evolve, and we are going to be seeing a period of very rapid change, regardless of whether the recovery is V shaped or glacial.
Short-term tweaks
You can protect your core positioning, or brand, and still adapt to the new conditions. For example, here are a few ideas for how you might respond in the short term:
- Pricing and packaging
- Can you package what you do differently? Break down a service into bite-sized chunks that don’t feel like such a commitment when clients’ cashflow is under pressure?
- Can you offer fixed price or capped price services to give clients some certainty around costs?
- Product development
- Can you evolve your product (or service) to respond to your market’s concerns right now? For example, if you’re an employment lawyer that probably means highlighting your expertise in furlough and redundancy, rather than gender pay gap reporting (which is currently suspended).
- Market segmentation
- Which of your market segments are likely to be most active at present? How can you bring those to the fore in your BD? If you’re a property law firm, for example, retail development is suffering but the warehousing and logistics sector is holding up well. (But don’t ignore that retail sector entirely – what free advice can you offer than will ensure client loyalty in the longer term?)
- Service standards
- If your position is all about premium service, what does that look like in a completely online world? You can’t create differentiation with visits to your smart Mayfair office at present, but you can make sure that your partners and fee-earners have decent cameras and microphones for Zoom calls, and follow some best-practice guidelines.
- If your style is more relaxed, maybe you can’t take clients to their favourite karaoke bar but you could organise a bespoke online pub quiz (our weekly favourite is with Big Smoke Events!).
And in the longer term?
We’ll return to this topic in a future post, looking at how you can reposition your business and set revised priorities as the new normal becomes clear.
By Victoria Ash
