Every once in a while in a marketing leader's life, a major rebrand occurs, and today's guest is fresh off a rebrand launch, and so I hit him up for the inside scoop. Welcome to "3"ā€¦three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker. Roy Sexton is the Director of Marketing at Clark Hill law. That's a firm of about 650 attorneys in the Midwest and across the USA. Roy, what was your number one takeaway to share with others, considering a major rebranding effort?
Roy: Slow down, you really need to learn your organization before you can dive in and brand them correctly, and you also want to know what they aspire to be, and, through that, observe, listen and learn, and the answers will reveal themselves.
Drew: Did you follow any kind of structure or process for observation?
Roy: We did. We've grown through acquisition, and it was important to knit the organization together, so we conducted a survey of everyone, attorneys and support. We had an 80% return rate, which is unheard of. We also surveyed our clients, and we saw what were we saying about ourselves and what were they saying about us. We then tested that with our internal leadership groups and a steering committee, and some really powerful patterns emerged.
Drew: That's really interesting, Roy. Can you give me an example of a pattern that emerged?
Roy: What we learned from the surveying we did was that people wanted to tell their stories about their experience in the firm. This aligned with what we were hearing people expect around culture change, diversity, equity, inclusion, mental health, and so we put pieces together that allowed our folks across geography, across race, sexuality, gender, to tell their stories of their experience in the firm. This benefitted us because our clients want to know what kind of people they're working with, and also the talent who will come work at the firm wants to know this is a good and welcoming environment. And that just enriched what was a very strong and clean and sophisticated brand with that humanity that was much needed.
Drew: Great insights, Roy. When rebranding, slow down, observe, listen for those patterns to begin to emerge, and you'll find marketing gold. "3" is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com and is just one of the resources we provide for marketing and business leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.