Differentiate your firm with benefit-focused marketing.

• Author: Cravatts, Richard L.

There is a popular radio advertisement for a bedding company that has an engaging and insightful way of telling its customers the compelling reason to purchase its products: "We don't sell mattresses," the ad claims, "we sell a good night's sleep."

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What makes this an effective bit of advertising? The company has avoided the usual trap of listing the attributes of its products to consumers, who may or may not care about those features. Instead, the company has wisely focused on the benefit that a customer will realize by purchasing the product.

All consumers are by nature egocentric and self-engaged. So they react more strongly to marketing that helps them clearly see the benefit they derive from consuming one product over another or, for that matter, from selecting one law firm over another. Attributes may well be important to prospective clients, and their "purchases" of legal services are often influenced by the number of attorneys, offices and practice groups that a law firm has. The most cursory scan of any law firm Web site offers a numbing sameness in the bulleted lists of factual data about the firm, which is something partners care very much about and many prospects care little about. Those facts and figures and lists are insufficient to create a brand identity.

Marketers frequently fall into the trap of thinking that they sell their product best simply by reciting the many attributes they feel help define and differentiate their product, whether it is corn flakes or legal services. That approach may work well with innovative products in new categories, such as Red Bull, TiVo or iPod, where there are unique proprietary attributes and no direct competitors yet. However, like many other mature industries, law firms often have a commoditization of products or services, because of innate similarities of offerings. So marketers must tell a more compelling brand story in order to motivate prospects to retain firm over another.

In their engaging book "Advertising Account Planning," Larry D. Kelley and Donald W. Jugenheimer note that attributes lose their importance if customers are unable to link benefits to the attributes; in other words, they say, "from a customer standpoint, the attributes don't do anything worthwhile unless there is a specific benefit attached to them." So legal marketing should always be less firm-centric in its brand message and more client-centric. Legal marketers should focus on making it...