Is Culture Change A Prerequisite To Marketing Success?
Seminars. Blogs. Creative people. Great ideas. Detailed plans. If marketing was easy, everyone would be good at it. But the disturbing sameness of law firm marketing and its disturbing ineffectiveness lead to all sorts of questions. In the world of business, there are memorable marketing campaigns to play an instrumental role in the success of a product. But one would be hard pressed to find a law firm marketing campaign that really launched a firm's success. Have you ever wondered why? I know I have.
I think I may have found an answer--culture. A firm's culture manifests itself in behaviors, and those behaviors in the results that marketing plans are designed to change. It follows that if you can change the identified behaviors, the results will change too. But changing behavior is not an easy thing to do, and marketing plans, no matter how well thought through, are not able to change the behaviors at issue. What causes behaviors? Beliefs--mindsets. Substantial research establishes the simple relationship between beliefs, which cause behaviors, which yield results. So to change results, you have to start with the beliefs basic to the behaviors that need to change.
How do you change beliefs? One obvious conclusion is that firm management must be strongly supportive of and involved with and significant plan. But there has to be more. Beliefs don't change by decree. They change by virtue of modeled behavior, rewards (financial and otherwise), encouragement and follow through. There are experts who help accomplish cultural change. Professional assistance is always useful. Without incredible commitment and follow through, though, one lesson is that trying something and failing may be worse than not trying at all. Such failures only reenforce the futility of change. Without open minds (not exactly a strength of lawyers), real change is unlikely.