AuthenticIdentity.com - Differentiation is the Core Challenge

DIFFERENTIATION - THE CORE CHALLENGE

Professional services firms often find themselves stuck in a value-destroying vicious cycle where commoditization of services and lack of differentiation drive profits ever-downward. The key to breaking the cycle is to build a truly differentiated organizational brand, but professional services firms face some unique challenges when it comes to building a brand.

For one, the word “brand” carries a lot of baggage, not least its association with appearance, logos, taglines color palettes and so on – things a lot of professionals consider superficial and trivial. Second, the “brand” is conveyed through people and the relationships they have with clients. Third, the “product” is intangible and highly malleable.

Then there’s the nature of the people who are drawn to professional services. They’re typically highly educated, independent-minded, autonomy-loving individuals who don’t much like to be managed. They’re not going to march in lockstep or parrot a script. Those characteristics enable them to create value for their clients.

So if you want to build a “brand” for the institution, you have to honor that independence of mind while at the same time deliver an experience to the client (and the firm’s own professionals) that’s sufficiently uniform to constitute a “brand”.

To do that you have to uncover the value-creating identity at the heart of the organization that causes those professionals to join and stay with the firm.

That identity, which is always there but often unexamined and therefore not articulated, shows up in the relationships your professionals develop with their clients, and in the value they deliver. Once you’ve articulated it, you can access it and be intentional about it. You can use it as a tool.

Identity is a richer concept than brand, and it better captures the complex reality of a professional services firm.

DIFFERENTIATING A PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM

Differentiation is a huge challenge for professional firms, and it is often made more difficult by their business models, culture and governance systems. The good news is that most firms are inherently differentiated, they just need to understand the four dimensions of value that they deliver, and translate those into behavior and marketing strategy.

Think of the most attractive and compelling people you know. Each of them radiates a sense of self: they know who they are and why that makes them uniquely valuable - and that knowledge guides and shapes their actions and the company they keep.

So it is with organizations: your unique identity determines how you create value. That identity determines your market, not the other way around.