What’s In a Brand?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis with AttorneySync. And I simply love coffee.

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I like to buy the same white socks all the time and only the same white socks, so I never have to match them when I do laundry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you are a lifelong customer of whatever sock company that is.

Conrad Saam:

Champion. Yep. Champion ankle length white socks. So it’s easy to do laundry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing where we don’t talk about Conrad Socks, but instead talk about marketing law firms. And speaking of marketing law firms, Conrad, You Own a digital legal marketing agency called Mockingbird, and you’re doing a rebrand.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I want to be super clear on this. This is a brand refresh. We’re going to talk about the difference between branding a refreshed brand marketing positioning later on in the show. But what do you think about the bird, Atticus?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love the bird, but I got to tell you, this bird is so beautiful. I think only a machine could create it,

Conrad Saam:

Especially because he’s wearing an orange vest generally. Yeah. So we use AI to create the bird, and we really, we talked a lot about whether or not we want to do that because of the signals it sends. I remember recently you got called out for recommending ai. I think someone said that. Why would a marketer recommend a tool that’s going to put ’em out of business? Why would you do that? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, again, my whole attitude about all this stuff is these are just tools. The reason people hire us is for the expertise. Am I going to ignore the tools? No, I’m not. But as we’ll talk about during the news segment, I’m not just copying and pasting AI content to websites because that is also a bad idea. But before we get into all that, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

We have a litigation heavy news segment, which hasn’t happened for a while. And then Gyi and I are going to go deep into branding, brand refreshes and messaging and positioning. This is going to be a good conversation because it’s a fun topic that you and I, this is really stuff that we really genuinely love and get deep on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s go.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome everybody to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. As always, we’re going to start with the news. All right, everybody, those of you who have known me for a while know that I was AVOs marketing guy for a long time and we got sued at avo. I believe it was three days after we launched, but not to be outdone. You can read about this on law 360, May 12th, 2025, a new class action was filed in federal court accusing AVO of misappropriating the identities of over 1 million attorneys to promote its legal marketing tools and referral sources. Gyi, what do you think about this latest lawsuit against avo?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I have no idea. I didn’t read anything about this lawsuit. I don’t know what the underlying claim is, but I know AVO has litigated some of this in the past and won. Now what’s the foundational claim? Are they getting after ’em because they’re bidding on their lawyer names and sending them to Avo to arbitrage PPC on their brand? That might be new. No,

Conrad Saam:

They’re saying I’m not a lawyer, as we know. I think this is a pretty dated argument. Is that because Ava is scraping bar names?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s a loser. There

Conrad Saam:

You go. Okay. Alright. Moving on from the base,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I

Conrad Saam:

Think, yeah, I mean basically the entire

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nerd fat this, yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. This is a very old battle that seems to maybe be good for link bait. And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We should have Josh King on here to talk about this topic.

Conrad Saam:

I think Josh King is playing golf in Arizona.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. He doesn’t want anything to do with this.

Conrad Saam:

He

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Does not want, he made some great arguments,

Conrad Saam:

He made some great arguments and I suspect he no longer wants to make any arguments regarding Section two 30. Okay. Another really interesting lawsuit. There is a complete mess with ai. Tell us the ai, what we’ve put in the show. Well, I’m going to tell you where it’s,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s being reported, it’s a couple of places around the web, but the San Antonio Express news reports that a San Antonio attorney sues over name appearing on another law firm’s website. I think it’s paywall, but we’ll put a link. Anyway, so basically what happened is allegedly, right, this is an active litigation allegedly,

Conrad Saam:

Allegedly sound like, well, this administration is good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And this is going to be a big warning because just like we were talking about fake cases getting into court, the fake content is all over the web. Largely. It’s not being monitored by anybody. Anyway, so this is the story. Allegedly firm a signs up to get AI content for their website. Apparently, allegedly, there are guardrails in place to prevent the AI from doing exactly what it does. The AI publishes pages that use another lawyer’s name and imply that that lawyer works at this firm. And so when you do, and I pulled internet doesn’t forget. In fact, a lot of these pages that are down now, because they’re fighting about this, they’re still indexed. You can still do site colon searches and see the pages index in Google. And by the way, some of the brand queries for this other firm’s name still show this RL coming up in the search results. And at first I was like, okay, look, this is bad no matter how it is, but maybe the AI was using the other lawyer’s name in some kind of context that could arguably permissible. And when I went to the way back machine, I’ll never

Conrad Saam:

Forget, you didn’t think that was the case. You didn’t, you’re making the extreme argument of where it might be. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I honestly going into it, I didn’t think it was going to be this bad. I didn’t think it was literally a page optimized talking about this lawyer, how great they were, and totally implying that they work at this firm. I mean, and this is reported in the story too. The law firm that did this is like they could have just called us up and we would’ve taken the pages down. And I’m like, that’s not how this works. You don’t just go out and publish and take it one purely false and misleading advertising that the firm should be on the hook for under the state borrow rules in my opinion, and a bunch of other issues that

Conrad Saam:

Relate to. So we had this done manually. There’s a firm up in Seattle, Chris Davis, and this actually ties right back to avo. He had endorsed someone on AVO ages ago because that built into the AVO algorithm, the rating algorithm. And then the firm that he had endorsed, the lawyer that he had endorsed, used the AVO rating to create a page about Chris Davis suggesting that he worked. It was optimized for Chris Davis’s name suggesting that he worked at that firm from a meta description. So this is now happening, which is gross, but it’s happening at the AI automated level. I mean, really problematic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, this is a particularly egregious example, but if you’re right now, if you’re listening to this and whether you hired an SEO company or whomever you’re working with, someone else has access to publish on your behalf,You’ve Got to review what’s being published period or somebody at your firm does. But somebody has to be accountable. And really, again, you’re publishing under firm names. Principles of the firm should be looking at this stuff. I mean, I’m empathetic, especially people want to try to compete and publish at scale and all this stuff and they don’t have time to review it, but look at what’s happening. Look what’s going on, not worth it.

Conrad Saam:

So on the flip side, I think it’s very important for you to do a name search for yourself. Go figure out what shows up when you look for Bill Murphy lawyer. Totally. I think that is now is a good time to sit down and run that name search

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Regularly. Regular

Conrad Saam:

On the regular, right? And the other thing, everybody, sorry to turn this into tactics. It’s supposed to be the news segment. Go do a site colon search on your website and see what shows up. There is more trash on your website than you think. That is a great use hack. That is a great use. Yes, any movies, you may have a question. Okay, a study on aios. Gyi, you really like this reading. Tell me more about it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do. So this is Kevin Indig at Growth Memo. We’ll put a link in it, UX study of Google’s AI over. So what they’re trying to do is, all right, look, we’re seeing all these AI overviews, how are people interacting with them? Google’s out there talking about how it’s actually creating more search volume and all this stuff, and everybody loves these aios. And so this is the first to my knowledge, a UX study of how people are interacting with these. And there’s a lot of really, really good stuff in here. But I wanted to pull out one highlight from the executive summary that I thought was really, really useful. And that is that he says, the decision filter has changed. Brand and authority is now the first gate search intent, relevance, the second snippet wording only matters once trust is secured. Residual clicks follow community proof and video, so yada, yada yada.

What’s happening is say you’re doing a search for best car accident lawyers in Chicago and the A IO is going to list a handful of firms, many of those times they’re unlinked. So it’s like, call it an unlinked mention of the firm name. What’s happening now is people are now going and doing a search on those brand names and they’re most interested in watching video content from that lawyer or that firm. So video distribution across major platforms, especially YouTube of course, because Google owns YouTube, at least for now, video on forum sites. Again, my thing is this, go look at your search query world and see which forum sites are showing up. Maybe there are legal specific sites where you can host video content, but I think this is a big paradigm shift in terms of it’s not just non-brand search, click into your site convert.

It’s going to be non-brand search followed by a brand search. And by the way, Google’s also embedded brand search links into some of the a IO results. So you do a search for Chicago, car accident lawyer shows, those law firms, and then that link is actually a link to a brand search for that firm. You’re going to see more of this and your data is going to show non-brand down, brand up because people are now going to do these follow-up residual services. Anyway, really interesting stuff. Go check it out. I know this is just the news.

Conrad Saam:

This is just the news. We are going to end the news. We’ve teased this. We’re now opening up for registration. Gyi, and I would love to have you join us for the lunch hour. Legal marketing’s first ever summit, specifically for in-house marketers. We’re going to talk later about branding, positioning and why you should be appealing to a specific segment of the audience. We want the in-house marketers who listen to this podcast to join us September 22 through 24 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Now, Gyi, we don’t want everyone here. We’re not having tons of sponsors. We’re not going to have paid a pitch from the stage. We don’t even necessarily want the lawyers. Who do we want to show up to Vegas and why would we

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Like them? I’ve been whining about the conference ecosystem for several years now, and so I said, well, if we’re going to whine about it, we got to try to solve some of these issues. Not going to solve all of them, but we really think that delivering value to the in-house legal marketer, they’ve got unique issues. They’re trying to navigate firm leadership, they’re trying to navigate relationship with vendors and partners. They’re asked to do everything under the sun. And so that’s who we’re designing for. And as Conrad mentioned, we want the community to provide feedback. We’ve got the link to suggest speakers and topics. Now, registration’s open. We want in-house legal marketers to come. That being said, if you’re an in-house legal marketing and you want to bring your lawyer along, apply, it’s going to be a curated list. We want this to be the best value we can deliver to the attendees. And in order to do that, we have to be mindful about the entire ecosystem. But it’s really designing for those in-house legal marketers, CMOs, VPs of marketing, marketing directors, even marketing managers. And if you’re involved in marketing in a law firm, please come. If you’re at an agency and you’re going to try to surreptitiously come, we are going to, I don’t know what we’re going to do.

Conrad Saam:

Make fun of you. We’ll be nice. We’re going to make fun of you on Let Legal, we’ll be nice.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We know we will. He’ll be nice, but he nice and can get questions of whether lawyers can come apply. If you’re a regular Lunch Hour Legal Marketing listener, we want to say yes, but we really are trying to design for this specific segment of the

Conrad Saam:

Listenership. So call to action, and this is going to sound as Selly and Sally, I don’t know if that’s a word, Sally, this is going to sound as commercial as possible. Head on over to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing dot com. Right now, there are only 100 seats available for the first 25. Use the code podcast to get $200 off the $699 attendance fee. Go ask your boss to send you to Vegas in September.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we want you to know, because we are sympathetic and understand that going to law firm leadership and asking to pay for flights and hotel accommodations and conference can be a challenge. We’re really not trying, we’re just trying to break even. That’s what our pricing is based on. Again, just maximizing trying to deliver value for the in-house legal marketing community. If you need help trying to justify the cost, hit us up on lunch, legal marketing. We’ll try to help you make the case. So Conrad, our friend over at the unbillable hour podcast, Christopher Anderson recently had an episode and we’ll put a link to this episode about rebranding, rebranding Your Law firm. But our sense is is that there’s been a lot of talk of rebranding going on right now, and I think we each have some thoughts as to why that’s happening. But let’s start out with what you’ve got going on with Mockingbird.

Conrad Saam:

Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I jokingly said you’re doing a rebrand at Mockingbird. What are you doing and why?

Conrad Saam:

Well, we are doing so the why is because our website is so unbelievably old and it needs an update. It needs an update, it needs a refresh. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Was listening. Well, that’s not a rebrand. That’s not a rebrand.

Conrad Saam:

It’s not a rebrand. And so if you want to go deep into this, I do recommend listening to, because for Anderson’s pod, he had Jim Heiner on it who talked about kind of three different layers of branding and rebranding. I think we have pretty strong opinions on this, but we are doing a brand refresh. And those of you who know who’ve known me for a while will remember that my business was originally called Atticus for Atticus Finch. And it was when I just was doing this as a bit of a lark. I never intended this to be an agency. And I knew at the time that there’s a company called Atticus Consulting who I recently ran into, coincidentally at Pulma. They’re now out and about a little bit. But I called my little kind of solo side gig Atticus, and I knew that brand existed.

I didn’t think it was ever going to be a problem until I decided to turn this into an agency and they sent me a trademark go fuck Yourself letter, which I totally deserved, and I had to rebrand to Mockingbird, which was amazingly confusing. And I want to really highlight that as being amazingly confusing. And so when we wanted to do a brand refresh, we’re deliberately doing a brand refresh, which we’ve introduced Atticus as a bird and there’s a playfulness to it, but it’s building and it’s an evolution of an existing brand. We are specifically and deliberately not changing the brand, which is the name. And Gyi, when you invited me on this pod, we talked about whether or not we should rebrand it. We talked about whether or not we should change the music and we didn’t. We can go back to the origins of a brand. I mean, this is trademarks. I dunno if they’re called trademarks. This is Marks literally marks on cows. That is the whole word.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. I’m a history guy. So let’s go back. Let’s start with defining some terms. I think it’s going to be important too as we distinguish branding from positioning and talk about messaging and whatnot. I think it’s important to establish some definitions here. As Conrad mentioned, many of you may or may not know branding comes from, they used to burn cows. They used to heat up a branding iron and hit the cow usually in the backside with their symbol, whatever the ranchers logo or brand, brand, whatever it was

Conrad Saam:

Literally brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So a lot of people when they think about brand, they start to go down that logo path, right? It’s like the actual brand is the actual physical embodiment of that symbol. And that’s just not the truth. The reason that they’d used to do this is because you knew that if it had that mark, if that cow had that burn mark, you knew the ranch, you knew the rancher, you trusted the quality of the product, you trusted the consistency perhaps. But the issue is, is that it’s not about the logo itself. The root of the reason the brand has value is because of the trust. It’s all of the things that make up your experience with this particular case, cow product.

Conrad Saam:

I mean the cows, at the risk of going deeper into history, the real reasoning on the brand, and I mean the metaphor extends here. Even what you talked about earlier with AI and creating the false impression that Joe, the lawyer works for a different firm, the real issue with the brand was if you stole a cow that was branded and you then took it to market, that money had to go back to the rancher. It was a way to stop theft, literally theft of cows and the theft of the brand. And that’s what the brand stood for. And that’s super fascinating. So to me, Gyi, we talked about the oversewing of a pendulum towards rebranding a firm, right? Changing the name, changing the logo. Can you give me some examples, some circumstances for a law firm in which that rebranding would make sense?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sure. So easiest one is I’m changing practice areas. I don’t want to do this practice anymore. Our firm, our brand has been the Michigan Divorce Law Firm. We’re not doing divorce law anymore. We’re going into personal injury. You’re not going to do that as the Michigan Divorce Law Firm. Okay? Second one might that’s somewhat related to that, but not necessarily change of practice is you’re going into a new market. So if brand you are operating a trade name or your brand is specific to a geography, you can’t be Illinois accident lawyers and then go do that in California. That’s not going to make sense. So you probably need to think about a rebrand there, or I might argue for just have multiple brands, but that’s an idea for a different day. And the reason that I’m reluctant to do the rebrand is because why confuse the people who already know your brand?

When we started attorneys syn, it was a different business model. It was much more in the lead generation, total attorney style paper lead. And even though we only did that for, gosh a year or two, we still retained the name, but we weren’t mindful about switching. But the reason, and we brought it up, same conversation we had on the podcast, should we rebrand? It’s like, well, no, everybody already knows this as this. And so again, I think there’s a lot to me, and it can answer your point of your question, is you’ve really got to justify it in terms of the cost benefit. The cost is going to be, it’s going to be a heavy lift, it’s going to be very time consuming. It’s going to create some confusion in the marketplace for some period of time and could be overall net, net, you’re starting over, right? It’s brand new.

Conrad Saam:

There’s nuances to the practice area within your brand. And you’re right, there’s a lawyer in the Seattle market, Bradley Johnson, who is well known as one 800 DUI away and has spent probably millions of dollars establishing that brand. Bradley decided that he’s kind of maxed out the market for one 800 DUI away and is now also a personal injury lawyer. Like many of you, he is hung the personal injury lawyer shingle and now has a massive problem because how is he one 800 DUI away as well as a personal injury lawyer? So I think, and on the flip side, you and I have talked to ad nauseum about throwing on that brand descriptor onto your brand as a DBA, right? So it’s Smith and Jones Injury Lawyers, right? Well, now if you want to extend what you actually do, that becomes a little bit more difficult.

I think that is a very, very real issue when you have defined yourself as what you do, if you may want to go further. And that also happens on the geo perspective. So I’m in Illinois and now I want to expand bigger. One of the other branding things that happens a lot. And branding, I mean name and logo. And by the way, just as an aside, if you want to get deep on logos and just get creative check out, Alan Peters from Peters Design company. I can spend hours looking at his assessments and very, very clever development of logos. I don’t know what he costs. It’s probably an arm and a like, but he is, as far as logo development, he is the best in the world. But I think one of the things that often happens is we’ve added another partner. Gyi, we want to put Jim Murphy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The suits problem. You don’t watch the suits, but in suits, this was a constant issue because they kept changing the name because they kept adding more name

Conrad Saam:

Partners. So there’s elk, elk and elk. I remember that. There’s a couple other for name, it’s a problem. What do you think about the name problem? How would you deal, we’ll call it the suits problem. How do you think about the suits problem? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It doesn’t really bother me. The bigger issue is when known name partners retire and you’re pulling their names off of the door,

Conrad Saam:

So there’s the additive and subtractive, right? So I’m wondering if I think we’re on the same page, what would be your recommendation if you are say Jones and Murphy and we want to add Smith, what would your recommendation from a branding perspective be?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Jones, Murphy, and Smith.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, now Jones,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The problem is what happens when Jones and Murphy retire?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so Jones gets retired, right? Is it now Murphy and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Smith, right? This is the problem. Go ahead. What would you do? First of all, I didn’t give you a chance to answer.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to disagree with you, so I’m going to let you keep talking so I can disagree with you more.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re going to move Smith to the front of the line.

Conrad Saam:

No, my very strong bias is if you have a brand, you don’t monkey with it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, so you’re saying don’t add anybody.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. You know what Smith is going

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To get. That’s probably the best. That’s the best answer. You’re right.

Conrad Saam:

Because otherwise you always have the problem. Smith is all. And now that you’ve set the precedent of putting Smith in there, what are we doing here? And so you then have an internal ego problem of throwing a bunch of people on the mast head and it serves no purpose other than to stroke Smith’s ego.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, I didn’t know that was an option. You’re right. Your answer is the best. Don’t change the brand.

Conrad Saam:

I’m sorry to. Well, thank you. Thank you. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, you’re right. I didn’t think that that was an option. I thought we had to, I thought we had name partner in order to keep the name partner at the firm, we got to name ’em or we’re doing a merger. And in order to do the merger, we got to keep the name

Conrad Saam:

Partner. We’re doing a merger. Great one. We’ve got the Jen Gore who had a very, very strong brand, and we’ve got Why

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sweet James.

Conrad Saam:

Sweet James, thank you. I was blanking on the brand. In a fit of irony, we’ve got the Jen Gore Sweet James merger. You have two well established brands, admittedly in different markets. What did they do and why was that a good idea? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I honestly don’t know.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I’ll tell you what they did.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sweet James is not, I think Sweet James is operating in the Atlanta market.

Conrad Saam:

No, but they did this correctly. And I think as we talked about before, you have the problem with the established brand, especially built around a person, but they’re not confusing it by adding Jen Gore’s to that masthead, right? Because otherwise,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s it look like in Atlanta? Is it Jen, Jen Gore brand in Atlanta?

Conrad Saam:

No, it’s sweet James.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Just sweet James. Is Jen on the Sweet James billboards?

Conrad Saam:

Probably.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t know the answer to that question, but my point is, if you turn it into Sweet James Gore or James and Gore, now you have a completely new thing that you have to try and recreate. And there is gravity in a recognized brand. And my bias is even if, let’s go back to Murphy, Jones and Smith, even if Murphy dies or Murphy retires, there’s no upside in getting rid of that name. So people call and they want to talk to Mr. Murphy, but he hasn’t been practicing law for a long time anyway, because he’s been running the firm. So that problem has already been solved. I think you keep things consistent. There may be some very, very edge case exceptions where you would make a change.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m going to throw this at you, and I don’t know. In fact, I would love to hear from listeners who are more versed in this than I am, but I think there’s an argument to be made that maintaining a firm name that includes lawyers who are no longer practicing law is potentially misleading under the rules, professional conduct.

Conrad Saam:

There are plenty of firms, let me use one example. The oldest law firm in Maine is Berman and Simmons, both of whom have been dead for more than a hundred years. I think there’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No Bermans and Simmons is at the law firm at all.

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe the courts have ruled on this one, and it’s okay.

Conrad Saam:

My and I, again, I’m a marketer, not an ethical expert. And because I’m a marketer, you can call my ethics into question from the get go. But my bias here is that the brand itself changing that is so unbelievably disruptive. It’s really hard to make a case for wanting to do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I guess I would say this, and this was kind of the other case, I’m with you. The other case that we kind of talked about here is this difference between, in all of your examples, you’re presuming that the brand has enough brand recognition that that’s actually, there’s equity there. Whereas I think a lot of firms, they say, well, we’re doing a rebrand. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re doing a brand, you didn’t have a brand to begin with. So I mean, technically, I guess you did whatever people thought of you, that’s your brand, but you never took a mindful approach to thinking about, well, what’s our brand? What are our brand values? What are we going to stand for? We want the experience to be like, what do we want the brand to mean for the first time of doing that? Is that a rebrand? I mean, I guess I don’t want to get semantic about it, but it’s basically going from not being intentional about a brand to being intentional about a brand.

Conrad Saam:

Well, let me ask you a question. You’re right. This is a very common case. You are the owner of a firm. Maybe you have three or four attorneys, maybe you’re looking deep into the future, and 10 years from now, you may want to either move into a different practice area, move into a different area, grow the firm aggressively, sell the firm, whatever it may be, where there’s value in the business beyond yourself. But you’re just Bill Smith and you’ve got this business, you’ve got three or four lawyers, and you’re thinking about the branding side of things. What would your advice be to Bill Smith who is contemplating a 10 year horizon, maybe expanding, maybe growing, wants to be known as a brand? You and I have talked about the value and the importance of brand wants to have that brand recognition. How should Bill Smith think about his branding exercise, what he should do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So my straight answer is I would go through an exercise like you would do in traction. I would do a mission, vision values thing. I would be talking about who our target market is, build the list, do the three uniques, because all of those things to me should influence what you think about the brand. My short answer, without doing all of that kind of work, if you’re just like, look, my main issue is I don’t want this to be my name. And again, maybe, I don’t know, I still think I feel this way. My thoughts on this might be in flux, so I’d be interested to hear your point on this, but the power of the practice area in your category, so let’s just use one that’s in the market. We’re going to talk about them anyway in a minute. Talk about top dog injury lawyers. Now, technically the brand is Top dog law,

Conrad Saam:

Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great. Not tied to James in any way really.

Conrad Saam:

Or location.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or location or a practice area.

Conrad Saam:

It’s top dog injury law.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well see, this is where my SEO Mind, and maybe it’s changing right now, I don’t know. But if you go look at his gs, his Google Business profiles, top dog injury lawyers,

Conrad Saam:

But what’s the brand

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Top dog law?

Conrad Saam:

It’s Top Dog law, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent. I mean, he’s

Conrad Saam:

In our market here. That is a deliber nuance, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, it’s top dog law. I think for him. And again, brilliant marketers there. I think for them, the top dog law, you’re not creating confusion when you see top dog injury lawyers, you know who top, there’s only one top dog. There’s only one top dog in the pack.

Conrad Saam:

Wow, there you go. The tagline brought to you by Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I think we could get into more to some other things you want to think about if you’re going to go this direction, the fact that it’s very concise, it’s very memorable, it’s very easy for type in traffic, it’s very easy for domain, it’s very easy for when you’re trying to do offline creative and you’re just trying to get one word in someone’s mind, like Top Dog law is very, very effective for that. And so I think for all those reasons, it’s a really outstanding model to follow if you’re going to go in that direction. But when we come back, we’re actually going to talk to the lawyers who might be in a market where Top Dog has entered and how do you position yourself against that. Hey Spotify listeners, we are super grateful to have you listening and giving us your time and attention. If you have a second, please rate the show and leave us a comment. And here’s what we want you to comment. What’s the wildest law firm branding example you’ve seen out there? As always, you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or hit us up on LinkedIn. Let us know what you think about this episode. We really want to hear from you.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we’re going to take branding further to where I think the actual conversation needs to be, which is messaging and positioning. I think these things are often conflated, but Gyi set off at the beginning. Branding is really name and logos, and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe that’s not what I said. To me, branding is all of the experiences that you have with the business. It’s all

Conrad Saam:

Of it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s the brand. I never said it was named in logos.

Conrad Saam:

So to me, words in my mouth, all the experiences, I’m putting words in your mouth, it gets some hate mail.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s everything that creates an impression in the mind of someone who interacts with your business. That’s your brand.

Conrad Saam:

So you’re putting messaging and positioning as a subset of the branding.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, maybe,

Conrad Saam:

Let me put it this way, is messaging and positioning and why does Conrad think it is more important than branding?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m going to talk about positioning. You can talk about messaging.

I’ve mentioned David C. Baker before. I’ve mentioned the business of expertise before. I think he’s a great resource on thinking about positioning and traction. Technically, they talk about this as well in the term of three unique. So I guess I’ll go through both of those exercises. So to me, in Baker’s context, you’ve got vertical and horizontal positioning. Horizontal positioning would be like we do personal injury law. That’s like the type of work that we do. Vertical positioning might be like, and we serve a certain segment of the overall market. It could be geographic, it could be like we do Chicago personal injury law. That’s a type of positioning. I don’t think it’s very strong. What you really want to do in Baker’s mind is you want to come up with a vertical and horizontal position that speaks to a very unique subset. So we use the people in legal, use the word niche.

It’s that kind of idea. But I think for me, the thing that’s also important from positioning standpoint is the idea of these uniques and so traction. They talk about three uniques. It’s these three things taken together that are unique to your practice, or at least a very, very small number of practices. And the whole idea, which we talk about all the time, is how do you stand out from a crowd of all of these other lawyers? That’s what positioning does. Positioning helps you stand out, and I’ll turn it over to you. That positioning should shape your messaging, in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:

And so the positioning, we talk about this ad nauseum, most lawyers view their positioning as trying to convince the population that they’re a lawyer, which is not, I mean, it is a positioning.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m not a florist. I guess technically that’s a horizontal position because you’re saying lawyer is the horizontal position, but there is zero vertical positioning and it’s very wide horizontal positioning

Conrad Saam:

And it is completely undifferentiated because if someone is completely undated a car accident lawyer, a florist is not in the consideration set, right? That’s right. It is completely sterile and unhelpful. So to me, the positioning, and I like kind of calling out the brave examples of positioning. We talked about Top Dog. Top Dog has identified that their market is not everyone in the United States.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

They have a very specific market that they’re trying to appeal to. And bluntly it doesn’t work for Conrad, but that doesn’t matter because it really works for their population. Enough people, enough people, and that’s all they need. They just want to win that piece of the market. And they can do it by standing out from all the other lawyers who are going out of their way to convince the population that they’re lawyers and that’s all they need to do. And that is the genius. And if Top

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Dog’s new to you, you can go to the Facebook ads library and just search Top Dog Law. And you can see some of the ad examples that Conrad’s referring to.

Conrad Saam:

And we typically like to use kind of extreme examples when we talk about positioning. So Top Dog is one, the Texas Law Hawk, which was kind of a ridiculous example, but very, very effective for a specific segment of the market was one Byron Brown out of Utah who is the anti lawyery lawyer who basically is going to appeal to people who hate lawyers. I mean, that’s a large-ish segment of the population. Love it or hate it. That is a reality. But look at Morgan and Morgan. Morgan and Morgan’s positioning is we are the biggest and therefore we are the best. Other classic examples of positioning are we’re the first, we’re the oldest. We’ve been here forever, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We fight the hardest.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, well, we fight the hardest. Is that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Positioning sense of one? I mean, how about why do you think the hammer’s a thing?

Conrad Saam:

Well, okay, so let’s get into the,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We hammer everything.

Conrad Saam:

How is the hammer unique? We,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I don’t know that it is

Conrad Saam:

Unique market, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, right. There’s hammers, different hammers in different area codes.

Conrad Saam:

To me, the messaging and positioning is really about genuinely being true to yourself. You talk about the core values, et cetera. Having that reflect who you are and having that broadcast to the right audience. And that is the essence. Let me, I’ll use myself as an example. There is a reason that I have not cleaned up my mouth for want of a better example.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Whatever do you mean?

Conrad Saam:

Well, this is a very recent example. We got feedback from a client who was like, I’m really perturbed about your article, your blog post called Fuck Google. And I get that we have a client for whom that there’s dissonance there, but that’s part of I part, my personal branding and messaging and positioning is a swear,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Like a sailor.

Conrad Saam:

Swear like a sailor. But it reinforces the like I am not going to be held back per spectrum. I’m going to call it out as I see it. And that’s part of who we are. But I think law firms really struggle on, I’m not suggesting that you need to swear, but I am suggesting you need to come out with language that is about you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. So again, for me, recapping here, I think about this, the brand is, it’s all the experiences, it’s the visual experiences, what people are saying behind your back. Brand positioning is how you’re going to market, it’s who you’re trying to talk to, how you’re trying to differentiate selling proposition, and then messaging as the actual words, visuals, whatever that come out of that positioning concept. But again, I don’t think these are, they’re not contradictory terms. I think they do have their own unique meanings. I think we talked about this and we brought up Top Dog and you brought up Morgan, but a lot of the questions that we get are Hagi top dog came to town, Morgan came to town, national players are coming to town. There are firms that are getting financed in unusual ways, creative ways. I think you’re going to see, again, more of this with a B, S and non-lawyer ownership of firms and stuff like that.

What do we do? What do we do? Gyi? And my answer is positioning. Positioning is the solution to this. And so talking about why you are more qualified because, or not even more qualified, I think that’s even the wrong thing. Why you are more in a more appealing option for the right audience because you are local, you live in the community, you’re at the events, blah, blah, blah. Because I think about the consumer that is consuming the radio, the billboards they’re making, their social media ads that they think are creative and they’re remembering that brand when they need that lawyer, their immediate reaction is, I just think of that brand because it’s in my brain. That is a segment. I usually don’t advise people to try to outspend, to try to steal that market share from that segment. I think it’s a fool’s errand, especially if you’re mid growth stage. On the other hand though, I’m like, you should be doubling down on the local stuff. You put what Morgan’s perceived strength is, turn it on its head. Morgan’s not working your cases. The bigger does not mean better. Here’s why local has advantages. Here’s why I’m in your community. I know I see you at the Friday Night Lights. That’s how you’re going to win enough market share, I think, to be able to grow and compete. Not outspend on Billboard. That’s my point too.

Conrad Saam:

And those big firms that come in, I think you kind of hinted at this, having the counter positioning to the Morgan Morgans, right? Having the counter positioning. That can be a very, very effective position. We are not this, we’ve got our good friend Tim SRO in Iowa,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mr. Iowa,

Conrad Saam:

Mr. Iowa, Tim sro, he asked me the other day, they want to do more motorcycle accident work. And there’s a firm in Iowa that is really deep on motorcycles and that’s all they do. And they have the tattoos and the bikes and from the clubs. How does Tim compete with that? Tim’s point was, I can’t out motorcycle these guys. He’s right. How do you come up with the brand that’s deliberately not that? And the messaging and the positioning that all supports, we’re not like this. We’re different and therefore we are a better or an alternative solution to what you otherwise think is the expected. I think that’s really, really important. Any other examples? Gyi, on your mind of great positioning for law firms?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I probably could think of some. I think it’s more valuable to try to talk about the characteristics of good positioning. And again, I think it’s its idea of speaking to a smaller, pick your segment, pick whatever segment it is, if it’s going to be super hyper localized, because this is going to depend on where you are and who you are. The other thing too is we talk about all the time is, and this goes back to why the traction stuff’s valuable in terms of mission, vision, values, what do you want your life and your firm to look like? That is going to guide your branding and your positioning. And so finding that segment and then really being reflective and super self-critical and ask people, ask colleagues, ask friends, what is it that you do that you are able to do that is truly you unique to you?

And some of it might be the affinity stuff that we talk about. Hey, I’m a passionate motorcycle person. I’m super into motorcycles. Well, guess what that should be. To me, that’s part of your brand identity. What is it that you do uniquely though? And I think that’s a great example with Tim and the motorcycle. It’s like Tim needs to be like, alright, what truly is it that I do? Is it that I am more willing to take cases to trial? Is there something about the way that I practice? Hey, I know a lot of lawyers out there, they’re not as technology enabled. That can be a positioning thing. So hey, it makes it easier for you. You don’t have to come into the office. We can do things virtually. But you got to find that thing that, and again, using the traction stuff, three of those things together that really set you apart and help you stand out

Conrad Saam:

And resonate with an audience. I think about, there was a movement, it’s probably started maybe a decade ago, but there was a movement around men’s divorce firms. And so this is around who my market is, which means you’re going to walk away from 50% of the market, which is fine. That means if you’re walking away from business because they’re not in your market, that is an indicator that you have a strong positioning. But their messaging is all built around and it’s multiple firms at this point in time, but the messaging is all built around the courts are sacked against you. And that really resonates with a segment of the population. And so I would think through what are the things that you can talk about that resonate with a specific set of the population that is going to really draw them to you? And definitionally means that you are not all things to all people.

Alright, with that, that is the end of our talk on branding, messaging and positioning. We’d love to hear from you. Please leave comments, send us questions. The last episode we did was answering two questions. That’s one of our favorite things to do. Send us questions and hopefully if you are an in-house marketer, I want you to go to whoever your boss is and say You should drop 700 bucks to let me go to Vegas and add so much more value to the firm over the next 12 months because I went to the Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing first ever in-house marketers team.

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