One of the best feelings is the one of seeing your Law Firm’s logo for the first time, and you know that “that is the one.” But like all things, your logo has an expiration date. The good news is that you don’t have to throw away your logo; you have to update it.
In this week’s conversation, we discuss when and why you should consider updating your logo or even rebranding your entire law firm. From the process that leads you to identify a rebranding need, to the actual rollout of the new creative work and promotional materials; we cover it all.
If your logo or something about your brand image no longer inspires you the way it used to, this episode is for you!
Send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com
Enjoy the show? Please don’t forget to subscribe, tell your coworkers, and leave us a review!
Liel: [00:00:00] Choosing brand colors wisely can impact how people perceive your brand. Research shows that using a signature color can increase brand recognition by 80 percent. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media, and this is In Camera podcast, where when it comes down to callers, it has to be neon. Welcome to In Camera podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations. Grace, welcome back another week. I’m so excited, Grace. I cannot even introduce this podcast. That’s how excited I am. Like, I cannot believe next week I’ll be getting on a plane heading to Miami to see you and a bunch of other people that I miss so much over these past 12, 13, 14 months. I lost count is just exciting.
Grace: [00:01:19] I’m super excited to, you know, obviously extremely stressed because it’s coming up very soon, as usual, you know. But yeah, I’m very excited to see everybody. And with all the crazy things going on, as you know, that you’ve probably seen doing.
Liel: [00:01:35] I am. Yeah, I am stressed as well. But I think the things that are stressing me out are a little bit more on the social skills side of things. Right. Will I be able to make small conversations with people again? Will I be able to eat a meal in front of other people that are not a part of my household? Like these sort of things are the ones that are stressing me out a little bit. And so it’s going to be an interesting experiment coming back and being part of the business community, just like all from a sudden from zero to one hundred.
Grace: [00:02:09] That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought about that, I guess, because in Florida we’re very open and we have been pretty much from the beginning.
Liel: [00:02:17] I’m so happy this is happening in Miami in such good weather, lively place, relaxed by nature. Right. Like it’s not a place that prompts stifness. That’s from the prompts a really traditional corporate business mindset. I mean, of course, it’s serious. It’s a serious conference, but it has like a nice vibe atmosphere to it. So I think it’s a very good location to phase back into these because imagine like going from these to Chicago Convention Center sort of super corporate, it can be a little bit more intense. Nothing against Chicago. I love it. I’m just saying, you know, big city, big convention center, it gets a little bit more intimidating. Like at least here we have the sea right in front of us. We are all bringing ourselves back to normalcy up to a certain extent because we were going still going to be wearing masks. They’re still going to be social distancing. I mean, it’s still an experiment as a whole, right? It’s not like, oh, we’re back. So, I mean, there’s a lot of elements here that are so interesting to go through. And I think we’re just not going to know how they’re going to feel and how are we going to respond until we’re there.
Liel: [00:03:32] So we’ll be reporting on that as we record our episodes from there, because, of course, we cannot miss an episode. And so something will come out from the NTL encounter. So stay tuned. Now, Grace, another thing that we’ve been talking about a lot behind the scenes is like preparing ourselves to go back. And one of the things that you’ve gone through is a rebrand a little bit. Right. So you’re still persist, but you’ve changed your logo. You’re changing a lot of the elements about your branding. So I think that’s a really good conversation to have because I think there’s a lot of myths that surround the whole idea of is it OK or not to rebrand and how to do it properly. So can you tell us a little bit, Grace, about how did your process started? Like, take us from the baseline? Like, how did you identify, which is probably the most difficult thing to do is identifying that the time has come to refresh something about your brand.
Grace: [00:04:40] Yeah. So it was actually pretty much came from Ed. You know, Edward Lake is the CEO of all of our companies. He’s you know, he’s got a huge marketing mind and a lot of times in the things in the way he thinks about things and we kind of talk about the way we think about things marketing-wise and the companies. And as many of you may or may not know, I’m the CEO of all of these companies. And that includes things like leaders in mass torts and persist software and his law office and certain things that he works in, which is all related to legal services. But it came to a point where every time we created a new company, you know, we’d have to have a brand and something related to it that was specific to that company. So it came to a point for us as all these companies where we’re like, well, we are known as persist, right? I mean, besides Ed and Jackovino and Lake and his law firm, side of things, we’re known as persist. So what’s the best way to make sure that all of these legal services that we are able to provide, whether it be software or mass tort? Or even publishing a book, how should we think about it, how should we brand that rather than having individual logos everywhere and companies and all of those different things? And that’s what Ed came up with. He’s like, well, they know us. This persists. So we are the first group of companies. And then it just sort of kind of developed really from that point on where Ed was like, well, if we’re going to be a persist group of companies, then we need to make sure that we have a cohesive brand look and feel and maybe not necessarily exactly like the look of persist communications, even though it still has the same name persist.
Liel: [00:06:27] Right.
Grace: [00:06:28] So that’s kind of how we came. Well, he came up with the idea and we went out to a very specific company that Ed likes and we’ve used before for other things, not specifically for design. So this was kind of unique in that aspect. When we put it to them, this is what we’re looking for. This is sort of what Ed’s ideas are. This is how he feels about the company, whether it’s formal or modern. And we can kind of go through that because I know those are like the heavy questions kind of come in. How do you come up with a new design? How do you even think about putting all these companies together? But that’s where you went out and in speaking to them, giving them sort of the look and feel of what we’re trying to achieve, they came up with the new persist group logo and that’s what you see posted everywhere. But that’s kind of how we came up with the idea was Ed was like, well, it needs to be redone, rebranded regardless. So let’s make sure it’s cohesive. And it makes sense that all of these companies are under one umbrella.
Liel: [00:07:32] You’re touching on something super important, which is having a cohesive brand. And not a lot of people think about it that way. They just think about their logo. They think about maybe the fonts they’re using for their logo and tagline. But then when they’re going on about creating all of the rest of marketing material or branding material or not following those same lines. So that’s already kind of like a big missed opportunity. You need to think big. It’s not just about your logo. What speaks about your branding? It’s a lot more than that, which starts with a logo with a palette of colors as well, very likely with a font, and then really cripples all the way down to the styling, which you’re right. So all of that is super important. Now, for the sake of this conversation, we’re focusing here more on the visual elements. So, Grace, you’ve decided, OK, we’re going to create a new mother brand that from there everything else is going to fall under. So what happened with those other brands that you have under the first group? Did they retain their same image or they also got adjusted and modified to match the new main logo?
Grace: [00:08:45] So we actually did a little bit of both. Right. And the reason we’re doing it that way, I think we may go the route of the group logo will be more prominent than the actual logos for the specific companies. Eventually, however, it’s a process. Right. So for us, it’s a matter of particularly in social, we’re trying to make sure that we retain the company’s image of what it does. I’ll give you an example. Leaders in mass torts, right leaders in mass torts it sells masterclasses. And so with the leaders in mass torts Logo, we can maintain that on the banner or at least, you know, maybe some header images. But the icon or the image that goes directly on in that circle on most social media, that’s what we’re retaining or changing, rather, into the persist group.
Liel: [00:09:37] Excellent.
Grace: [00:09:38] So that we’re again doing both,
Liel: [00:09:40] Which for those who haven’t seen it, it’s a very interesting figure. I don’t know, I’m not sure, it’s not a geometrical figure, but it feels like it. Right. It has such a beautiful design and it’s complex. It’s kind of like it’s like a network of lines that cross between each other and it makes a P. And what really stood out for me primarily is the fact that that’s exactly what forces does. And I’m talking now more about your software, which is it creates something that is extremely complex. It’s presented to you as a solution that it’s easy to implement and understand. And that’s how the logo feels. It feels clean, seamless, and modern. And so, in my opinion, it’s kind of like a perfect fit. And I honestly great I’m very, very tough and rough when I go on about talking about logos, I don’t hold back. And so I really love this one. I can I mean, I’m telling you upfront, I love this so much more than what you used to have before. Now, Grace, thank you for sharing a lot of what your experience with rebranding has been now let’s talk a little bit about other businesses, other law firms. When is the time to rebrand, right? When do you need to refresh your logo? We’re first of all, do you even need to do it? The answer is yes. Right. I mean, you need to adopt.
Liel: [00:11:08] You need to move on with times. Now, even when you look at legacy brands, we’re talking Nike, we’re talking McDonald’s, we’re talking Apple, you name it, all of them, Coca-Cola, all of them have adjusted and adapted their their logos and brand throughout the years. These may be small changes, but you may not necessarily notice unless you’re seeing side-by-side comparisons, but they have made changes. And if you go on and look into tech companies, oh, my God, they’re changing their logos, like every year they’re updating it. So it’s a hundred percent a good practice to be refreshing your brand and logo in a way that stays current with what your brand is doing in terms of the services that it provides, in terms of the values that it’s adopting or the way that they are just evolving into today’s world. And so you can still retain a lot of the same elements you have. You just need to refresh it. Grace ourselves, we recently adjusted our logo because as you very well know, we use pastel colors on our logo. And what we noticed is that when we were doing primarily printed materials, those colors were very, very hard to see from a distance, particularly, or depending on the background that they were getting printed on. So we’ve decided to adopt, adjust those colors to darker versions of those same colors. And that is the kind of adjustments that you do to your branding that they may seem small, but they are actually important.
Liel: [00:12:51] And you need to plan and you actually need to execute them. They don’t just happen because they happen. And here is the key element here is once you start with it, then you need to have a really good plan to make sure that all the changes get implemented everywhere that they need to be implemented. Just as you were saying, Grace. Right is not just, OK, I updated my logo and I put it on my website or I updated it on the next marketing material that I’m going to be putting out there. You need to introduce it into your website, use social media platforms so that there is that consistency. Right. And as you’re starting, I mean, this is important stuff grows because a lot of people buying in order stationery and all of these little giveaways for the law firms and staff by the thousands. And they had it in stock. So you need to plan these things. Now, is it the end of the world to have two versions of one brand going on at the same time mean probably won’t really have a devastating impact. But the bottom line is that you need to have an idea as to how you’re going to phase out the old so that at some point you can fully transition to the new what do you think?
Grace: [00:14:00] One hundred percent. I mean, that’s the biggest thing, right, is, is use it as an opportunity for your marketing as well. Right. Drip it out little by little. Let people get excited about the fact that you’re rebranding. I mean, be excited about the fact that you’re rebranding because it is an exciting time for a business to be able to do this. To make that decision to come to that conclusion is usually because they’re at a point in their business lifecycle where they are getting to a next point of potential growth. And so a rebranding is fantastic for that.
Liel: [00:14:31] I also think, you know, it. I’m I always say this, and this is just the way I like to manage. I love the idea of involving your team in these types of decisions. Getting their input is just great, right. You definitely want to have a great design team to support you in whatever is that you want to do. But the ideas need to come from within. Those really need to be reflective of your beliefs, of your values, of what your team stands for and think it’s always a good exercise to just take everything that touches your brand and see, well, I mean, are we still current? Do we still feel that everything that is about us really continues to reflect us as we are? Or can we now do it a little bit better? Can we adopt more current trends? And that’s the whole point. You definitely want to be up with trends when it comes down to your logo, because it means that you’re current, that you’re relevant. Now, it’s not about just jumping on board on every single trending dial that is out there, but you certainly want to keep up with times, right? I mean, I think that’s really the message. So, yes, you want to follow trends. You don’t necessarily want to be influenced by what’s trending right now, in this minute, in this day, because obviously, it’s always it’s also something that you don’t want to be doing every three months, there’s other ways that you can keep your brand current without necessarily having to rebrand so frequently that it just confuses your people, your market.
Liel: [00:16:05] Like, who are you at the end of the day? Now, Grace here is another different, slightly different type of rebranding that also sometimes has to do with the logo, with the name and such as multicultural agency that we are. We sometimes get asked or are facing the situation where you may have a law firm that their name is in English, right. It’s in English. Now, what should they do with the brand when they try to create a product that is for the Hispanic market or they’re just want to present themselves on a Spanish version? Should the logo be or the name of the brand. Right. Needs to be translated into Spanish because one thing is the actual content and your marketing materials. Those without a question. Yes, of course you have to recreate them in Spanish. Now, what about the actual name of the brand? And most ninety-nine percent of the times answer is no. Your brand stays what it is in its English name. You can do it. But for instance, in the event that your name has an equivalent in Spanish or English, you don’t have to change your name to the Spanish version and backwards because then it can really confuse your market and really not be able to connect between.
Liel: [00:17:28] Is this the same brand? So that’s one thing. Now, the one thing that I will say it’s worth always translating is going to be your tagline. So that’s one hundred percent something that you want to make sure that in either version is translated. Now, when are there instances where it would make sense? Like I’m saying here, you can be Grace Montealegre law firm and then las Oficinas legales de Grace Montealegre. If you’re very, very new, you can potentially do that. If you’re being around for a while and you’re trying to open up yourself to the Hispanic market at that point, you need to stick to your brand because it’s already created. Right. Like people have already seen your TV ads, they’ve already seen your billboards, they’ve already seen you under this brand. Let them recognize that. But then everything else needs to be on a language that they will understand. And so that’s how you go about dealing with branding in multiple languages. And particularly, what do you do with your main logo, your brand? I would recommend it’s one hundred percent good to create a version in Spanish if part of your logo is your tagline, which probably it is in some versions of your logo. So, Grace, now tell me a little bit about what did you find being the most challenging part in your journey and your experience here recently about completing the cycle of rebranding?
Grace: [00:18:54] I think for me it was probably just making sure everything is being updated in a timely fashion, but not too quickly to alienate people from what our current brand was. And so that’s kind of why I think, you know, coming up with that in-between idea with the social media and then eventually completely changing it to the new look and feel was why we went that way. Because that was to me was probably the hardest part. We are I mean, we’re pretty good about creating promo items and using and purchasing just enough with a little overage, obviously, for events. And so we took the opportunity at this time because of covid honestly, to be able to kind of redo everything that we have and relook at everything. So all the things that we’ve been telling other people, Liel, that we’re trying to tell people to do that, you know, take a look. Right now is a good time. Right now is the time we actually did that. We try to practice what we preach on our podcast here. And, you know, we tried to take the opportunity right now to do that. So for me, that was kind of the hard part of it, was making sure it looked clean, cohesive across the board and that all the companies that we have under that umbrella get that refreshing. Right, that fresh look. But they still know it’s that they still know it’s leaders in mass torts. They still know it’s Persist Communications, but it’s got a new look and feel. So that that for me was kind of the hardest part, I think.
Liel: [00:20:25] Yeah. And I actually I mean, there are strategies for rolling out new branding and it’s probably you’ve received several emails from brands that you follow that you’re subscribed to their newsletter, that they are actually giving you a heads up. Hey, starting May 1st, new style, same brand. Right. So it’s a very, very common practice. To actually inform in advance your community about the changes that you have lined up in terms of your branding, is one hundred percent necessary? Well, it depends how major is going to be the change. Are you going for a completely new logo and colour scheme? Yes. One hundred percent. I would one hundred percent recommend you to in the process of rolling this out, inform your existing clients, past clients, people that you interact with on a daily basis about this change so that they can expect it and they can get excited about it as well. Because, again, these are things that just as you were saying, Grace, I mean, this is great social media content and it’s a great place also to test things before you actually go full-on with your changes. But with that being said, like you said, Grace, here, it’s keeping things timely, not overthinking it, not overdoing it, not over-complicating the process, because it’s all about getting things done at the end of the day as well.
Grace: [00:21:45] That’s what it is to make sure everything is getting done in a timely fashion and, you know, cohesively and that it all looks good. You know, I mean, like you said, there’s strategies behind everything. And you just got to make sure that you create a strategy before you dive head into something like a rebranding. I mean, it takes a lot of thought, effort, and time to make sure it’s done right. And everything has to have a strategy behind it always.
Liel: [00:22:11] Grace, let’s go for takeaways before we do that, I want to ask you something, Grace, because you guys came up here with a tagline that I really liked for Persist. And what’s the secret, Grace, for a good tagline, do you think so?
Grace: [00:22:27] It’s funny that you say it like that. Like what’s the secret? I’ve been following advertising commercials my whole life. It’s just one of those things that I really love. And so when I hear something, it just clicks. And that comes from consumer behavior analysis of data and making sure that you understand why somebody will click or act on something that you put out there. And with that kind of base understanding, you can create something like a tagline that not only makes sense, but captures their attention immediately. So Ed came up with this specific tagline. Ed is pretty phenomenal when it comes to coming up with these types of phrases and tag lines. And he just said, you know what? Well, persist, what does it do? He goes, it helps you. It pays, you know? And then you’re persistent in what we do. We’re persistent in the communications. Our software is persistent. We persistently go after people as a company. And then that whole Danica Patrick thing that we’re doing at NTL, where we’re going to have a step up, meet and greet someone like her, embodies that persist, feel right. She’s persistent. She’s a female in driving and racing, unheard of back in the day. So he came up with that tagline probably in a conversation, actually, now that I’m thinking about it, we were just talking about stuff and he says, hey, you know what? Persistence pays. Yeah. And that’s what happens. It just it was from a conversation and like, just talking about our. Yeah. The way we feel about our company and how we operate as employees and even the people that we work with. We like people that are persistent. And so that’s just really how it came about, it was a conversation, and I know most of the time it’s from brainstorming sessions and, you know, you come up with different words that you kind of put together, like there’s a strategy behind coming up with a tag line. But for us, it just happened to be a conversation that Ed came up with
Liel: [00:24:39] Every time that I say involve your team. That’s exactly what I mean. You know, don’t just hold up meetings and put everyone on the spot and ask them in the least creative environment about things. It’s not about that. It’s about having genuine, engaging conversations about the strategy, the vision of the brand, where things are going. That’s when this kind of ideas come up, not when you put yourself in a boardroom with a whiteboard. Zero inspiration around you when you say, OK, let’s come up with ideas for a tagline. That’s not the times when these things happen. These things happen when you are really engaged doing some team-building activity with the team, maybe not even in the office. Right. I mean, Zoome calls probably not the best place to do these kind of things. So that’s exactly what I mean. You have conversations about how do you envision things? What’s our goal? What is it that we do? What is it that we want to convey in every single interaction that we have with people who don’t know about us? But it really has to do a lot with how involved the people are in the conversation when this is actually happening. So that’s why really outings are extremely effective. Retreats are extremely effective because they give you they create that space. Grace. I’ll tell you this, if you were to ask me that same question, why do I think is important for coming up with a good pipeline? I think it’s really delivering your value proposition in the least amount of words possible. And it’s not an easy thing to do. Right, because you really need the least amount of words possible. It’s really three at most four. I mean, depending on which words they are, you don’t it needs to be a tagline. It’s more so that’s I think really what makes it great. And one hundred percent worth it to get ideas, to get people to contribute what, what they believe because the best ideas come from unexpected places.
Liel: [00:26:33] Grace, let’s do our takeaways.
Grace: [00:26:37] I think that should be takeaway number one. Best ideas come from the unexpected places. So don’t forget that this is not linear. It’s creative. So you have to involve your team,
Liel: [00:26:51] Create opportunities for creativity to emerge. I think that’s a great place to work because that’s also probably when you’re going to start having conversations about how should we rebrand, are we going to be all more effective, more comfortable, and better represented with a different or some tweaks in our branding. So I totally agree with that first takeaway. I loved it.
Grace: [00:27:16] So I think takeaway number two can be a little mishmash of the different things that we’ve been talking about. Take advantage of the fact that we’re still in somewhat of a covid world in that you’re not being required to go out as often and you still have the opportunity to take a look at what you’re doing right now, marketing-wise, branding wise, and just do like a thermometer check, make sure that you are where you want to be, that you don’t need to rebrand anything. Or if you do think about it and put it into action, now is always the time. Procrastination is never a good thing, particularly when it has to do with your businesses, look and feel and how people perceive you.
Liel: [00:28:04] Very good point, Grace. One hundred percent. And what would you make our third take away to be
Grace: [00:28:09] During a rebranding. For me, it was a lot of things at once. Right. And try not to get overwhelmed. I think that that’s a really big and important thing if you get overwhelmed and you don’t bring in your team to help, you will get overwhelmed and you won’t get it done. So I don’t know that it’s a takeaway. It’s more of a note of how I felt when I was going through it.
Liel: [00:28:37] You know, it is having an organized rollout, a critical action plan in place. Right. So you know very well when things should happen. As always, work with deadlines, keep every party informed. Don’t, as you say, I think, get too obsessed about doing every single, every single thing at the same time it can be faced and just set up the priorities and go after the things that can be easily accomplished first, because at the end of the day, they’re going to have to be taken care of. So the fact that they’re easy doesn’t mean that they’re unimportant is just giving you an opportunity to take care of those things. So then you are free to focus on things that may require a little bit more organization, whether it starts taking care of your stationery branded TV ads, whatever it is that you need to recreate. Right. Because all of those things are going to be very important. That eventually gets streamlined with your new brand, Grace. That’s a really good conversation, it’s very hard, right, to just stick to a logo and the rebranding is because rebranding is really a massive exercise. It doesn’t usually just stay; starts and ends with a logo thing, but it most of times can be ignited by our conversation. As simple as, hey, do you think that our logo needs a touch-up? And the next thing you know is, is your building on your website, so. Oh, yeah. One hundred percent, Grace. All right.
Grace: [00:30:13] Well, I want to make one note because I forgot to say something when you were saying about translating your tagline. Guys, I know for us because we’re both Hispanic Liel, it’s not even a thought to do this. But I want to make sure everybody out there understands. Never do a Google Translate, please. Please. I can’t say that enough. Do not do a direct translation of your tagline. It will never, ever, ever work. I can guarantee you that. It will almost never. OK, maybe I should say no. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it will not work.
Liel: [00:30:46] Yeah. Have someone you know who’s a native Spanish speaker just have a look at it and seek their advice. Good point, Grace. Thank you very much. And see you next week.
Grace: [00:30:57] See you next week.
Liel: [00:30:58] If you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your co-workers, leave us a review, and send us your questions to ask@incamerapodcast.com. We’ll see you next week.
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