Episode 12 Elliot Moss, Mishcon de Reya: The Problem with Brand in B2B

The Problem with B2B Marketing is a podcast for everyone working in B2B marketing and sales today. In each episode, we interview expert practitioners to explore specific problems each of them has faced, from common issues to emerging challenges. By talking to people who have been there and done it, we aim to share with you clear, pragmatic, and actionable insights to inspire you to develop solutions of your own. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Problem with B2B Marketing. I'm Kevin Sutherland, strategy partner at Voluum. We're a marketing consultancy and studio working for and with business brands. And a big part of what we do is helping those brands solve marketing problems, whether that's navigating new opportunities, overcoming internal challenges, or making better use of their resources. So we talk a lot about problems. And more importantly, what the solutions are. Hence the name of this podcast. Today I'm joined by Elliot Moss, who's partner and chief brand officer at Mishcon Derea. And according to your official profile on the website, with overall responsibility for brand marketing, communications, client relationships, product development, and new business. So quite a long list. But rather than me reading the rest of your profile out, could you perhaps, Elliot, give us a a quick intro for anyone that doesn't already know you. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I think my job is about growth. So my, my role at Michiganderer, the law firm, is to work out ways of helping fee earners build their businesses in a very— on a small personal level, how they build their practices on a slightly wider level, because each practice has its own world. We have 36 practices. And then how we also build the firm's reputation so that we can make all three work together to enable growth to happen. And brand, as we will go into, is— I have a relatively specific definition of what brand is about. And my background is advertising. I spent the first half of my working life in advertising. I started as a graduate trainee at an agency called Leo Burnett, which is a behemoth of an agency, a kind of first-generation agency from the 1930s, and then went to become managing director and shareholder at an agency called Liga Stellani. And then joined Michicon having had a few years working with them on developing their brand strategy. And I'm in, I also, I also do some, some podcasting. I've been, I've been presenting a radio program called Jazz Shapers for many years. I interview founders of businesses, do that. I'm involved in a few startups. I sit as a trustee on a charity and I'm involved in a legal industry body as well. So I've gotta have got to find more things to do, Kevin. You know, I'm really looking for the next gig. Okay. Hopefully this gives you a platform to do that then. You've touched on the subject for today. I'm really excited. To talk to you about this today because we've covered a lot of ground over the last, say, 12 episodes in this podcast. Lots of different problems. Most of them perhaps tend towards the more executional, how do you build an audience for a podcast, that sort of thing. And one or two sort of bigger, more conceptual things like, you know, the problem of orthodoxy in B2B where so many businesses just seem to be doing the same thing because that's the way things were always done. But today, talking about brand is such an important and perhaps overused and misunderstood concept. And as Chief Brand Officer, I think your perspective on this is going to be invaluable. If we dig into that, we've worked on a number of projects in the legal sector over the last few years, and the client there is typically a CMO or a business development director or a client service director. I don't think we've worked with a Chief Brand Officer. Within the legal sector. And yet all of those businesses had, or rather is, a brand. So it begs the question, what even is a brand in professional services? I'm sure you will tell us your view on that. But when you look around the topic, and there's a lot of baggy vocabulary when it comes to brand and branding, variously you could take the cynical view that a brand is a luxury. It's the thing that you invest in when the times are good and cut back on when we need to win business fast and therefore prime the pumps for lead gen. I'm sure you won't agree with this, but for some people it's a logo. It's just simply the thing that reminds the client who they picked to work on this particular brief or project. Perhaps more positively, it's a promise. It is the thing that you want to be known for. It's the thing that you say you'll do and then hopefully live up to it. And for others, it's either the most important or least important concept for businesses seeking growth. So none of those is right. But maybe you could set us straight. Yeah, I mean, look, I studied politics at university and politics is about ideas and ideologies and leaders and history and voters deciding in a democracy what happens. And in an authoritarian regime, the opposite, people deciding what they're going to do with their power. And political parties are brands, political leaders are brands, religion is a brand, all the different religions that we have. So a brand is just a word for what people think about something and what they think about it has got nothing to do with, or rather it's got everything to do with everything. And the everything is, if I now quickly move from de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, because that would be dull and we're not going to talk about police culture, although I find it fascinating, obviously as a politics student, what that means in the professional service world and specifically in the legal world is the service. Right. So forget websites, forget clever lines, forget a strategy on a piece of paper, apps. This is all, these things are critical and we'll come on to them. But what it really means is, as a service, what do people say about your service? And the conversation I have with trainees, and I do a bunch of training across all of our different cohorts, I say, whatever I say about Michelin d'Oréa is absolutely a waste of time and a lie. And disingenuous and there will be dissonance and we will have a problem if what you deliver to your clients isn't the thing I say that you are delivering. So brand starts with service for a service brand. It's very different. For years I worked with Procter Gamble. It's a washing powder. Yeah. It was a washing powder brand. There was a million other brands. I worked on Daz. I did the Daz Doorstep Challenge many, many years ago, but it was predicated on Daz making your whites white. If it didn't make it white, then everything else was anathema. If our lawyers aren't delivering a bold, incisive, sophisticated, responsive, kind, generous, collaborative service, we don't have a brand. If we don't deal with people that we are referred business to in a collaborative, open way, we don't have a brand. If people don't work with each other in mishkondareya, we don't have a brand. The brand summary, the kind of articulation, only works when the service delivers on a certain level, when the connection strategy, a sales strategy, is true to the thing that we say it is. And then the way that we articulate our brand and whether I'm building an audience for a podcast or whether I'm working out digitally where I point the needle, the arrow, or whether I spend money with The Economist and whether I do all of those things and we do in different practices, in different geographies for different reasons with different messages. None of that works unless the reputation you have is hard-earned and is a good one and is reflective of the things that you're saying. So talk is really cheap. And I think that's the problem. Of course, the logo's important. Everything matters. Absolutely everything matters. Every time something goes out the door of Mishcon Derea, it matters. But the most important thing that goes out the door of Mishcon Derea is a letter to a client or a conversation or a meeting. So it's just about understanding the continuum. It's not a luxury. And by the way, it's not even something you invest in or not. It's what happens. It's like you wake up in the morning, you go to work, and that's happening. A brand is the summation and the outcome. Of course, there's inputs in there, but you can't help it. You've got a brand whether you like it or not. You just better work out how best to develop that. So thank you. And that's a very, very clear and very precise definition. And I think, you know, you quite obviously any service people-led business, the way you defined it makes absolute sense, right? You are, you are the product, is the people and what they deliver to your clients. Traditionally, and again, in a lot of the professional services businesses that we've worked with, brand and marketing are very, very intertwined, closely aligned. They are, and marketing execution is probably the purest or certainly the most frequently cited evidence of brand and branding. What you've described is much more, I think, about behaviors and culture within the organization. Now that most marketeers that you speak to don't necessarily have responsibility for or oversight of those concepts. Is that in your— 100%. —responsibility? So there's a list of stuff that I'm overseeing and I'm responsible for driving. Of course, I'm responsible along with 650 lawyers for a bunch of that stuff. But my job is to set the direction. And the reason why I'm responsible for those things is probably by default. When I started working with Mishcon, it was to define the articulation, the essence of Mishcon. But what you quickly become aware of, especially in professional services, is that without all the other things you've just mentioned, the behaviors and the culture, the way that we manage our clients, the way that we win new business, without those being connected inextricably, you have a disaggregated approach to what your business stands for. And that's why you said I've not been— we've not— there aren't many chief brand officers. I made the name up. I tried to find the words that would reflect or the title that would reflect what I do. I don't have a job spec that anyone has written for me. I joined Michelin Doraire having been a managing director. And I looked at this thing and I said, the holistic picture is you've got a few buckets of things that need to be connected here. There's the way that we deal with client retention and development, bucket one. There's the way that we deal with client acquisition, bucket 2. There's the way that we deal with intermediaries, because a massive part of all business that comes into professional services is from a recommendation, bucket 3. Yeah. There's a way that you then deal with brand. And under brand, yes, of course there's marketing. And I would like to think that we continue to be inventive and creative and we're very precise about the use of data as well as ideas. But it's of course my shop. The shop of Michelin needs to be, I want us to be at the cutting edge. It's never good enough. And with the advent of AI and how that will existentially change things, that's the whole next frontier. But brand and marketing is bucket 4. And bucket 5, on a good day, is product development. So those things, all of those add up to a business which has got a chance of growth in the market, a disproportionate share of winning, and a brand which stands out because it coheres. Because my business is not homogenous. Most professional service firms or some law firms focus on one market. Mine focuses on many, many markets, points in many directions. So the purpose, or rather the job that the brand has in the morning when it wakes up, is to manage to cohere at the highest level and yet give space at other levels to talk to very different audiences. I've got a portfolio. Yeah. In the same way Procter Gamble has a portfolio or a VC has a portfolio, and there's a thread which needs to work. But then there's a culture which needs to work. Even if we're, even if I've got employment lawyers over here talking about incentives and bonuses and challenges over there, I've also got private equity in here. I've got big ticket corporate litigations over there. And I've got an M&A in corporate. I've got fund rate, so many different things. So the brand has to work really hard, really hard. So I'm not, this is the, if anyone thinks it's a luxury, if any leader of a professional services business thinks it a luxury. They fundamentally don't understand how they can build their business quicker. So on that point, you spoke of a portfolio and you said at the start about helping practice leaders to grow their practice. And I think you said there was 32 different— 36, I think, give or take. But how do you do that? How do you, for want of a better word, how do you leverage the brand? How do you ensure that there is consistency across all those different individuals and diverse kind of practice priorities or areas of focus. How do you, in simple terms, how do you apply the brand? It is really, really, really, really hard. There's no way, no two ways about it. What you have in professional services is an oversupply of clever people, well-meaning people, hardworking people, competitive people. And what each one of those practice leads will do is write a business plan every year. Yeah. And they will say, my objective is to go from X to Y, the Y is usually 15% revenue up, margin nice and high and all that. The way I'm going to do it in my market is the following. And if you now imagine laying those out on the table here, 36 of those are propositions that need developing around how they're going to win. That isn't done just by me at all. That's done by those people that lead with input from our Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Managing Partner, a whole bunch of people. That get involved, including my different department heads that are there. But none of those people know the business as well as the person leading it. And so the job, it's a bit more than nip and tuck. It's a hand on the tiller to say, yeah, when you think about that market and then you input the point around what you're trying to do from a brand perspective, probably the best way to bring that thing to life is, and then you do X. So what I like to do is I'm not, you can't be a top-down here's what you need to do because it's facile. Yeah. And it's not deliverable. I've got 50 people in business development, 650 lawyers. You do the maths, you're never going to be able to say this is what we're doing. I depend on those partners leading the practice to be the managing directors, and then you need to advise them really well. And if I can control some of the messaging around that, and I can remind them through our client feedback program, which we do regularly, and I can remind them through our pitch reviews, which we do regularly, this is the best way of doing it, then I'm going to be able to influence how they behave, how they deliver client service. On a superficial level, what the letter looks like. On a more practical level, we have something called CARE, which is our client care. It's both a set of behaviours and a programme for our bigger clients. We are able to remind people of that. Later today, I've got literally straight off this conversation with the newly made-up partners about client retention development and about winning new business. But the one thing I'm going to stress to them actually is around the idea of ownership. Because when you own your business, Kevin, you behave differently to employees. And what we all want our employees to do is behave like they own the business. Yeah. And so things like that. And then I talk some practicalities about it's a 24-hour turnaround on notes from meetings. It's a don't spell the client's name incorrectly. It's a, whatever it might be, there's some quality standards we have which deliver brand. So anywhere in the business, it's a way that we do an event. I can say, no, no, it isn't pink balloons. This sounds again silly. It's going to be red balloons or whatever it might be. I'm involved also in the way that the office looks, in the way that our front of house team behave. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I'm asked to help with because I really care. I'm slightly strange. In that I see how it might manifest itself that coheres with the brand and drives the brand. And that's what you do. And then the great people take it on and they come to you and they say, what about this? And I go, that's fabulous. Maybe think of it like that. So it's always been based on hopefully the quality and the consistency of what I've delivered and my team's delivered that enable me to influence different parts of the business. But it is influence because if you're not good, people run a mile from the non-Fiernas in the business because they just think waste of time. It's overhead. Literally there goes the overhead and think, what are we doing? Yeah. So I have to earn that. I literally have a slightly Woody Allen fear of the world collapsing and me being at the bottom of the heap because I'm absolutely rubbish and irrelevant. Every day I wake up and go, it better not be crap today. Yeah. And then I'm driven to say, what are my decisions that day? And that is really how I've been. It's exhausting, but that is how I do it. So you are absolutely right upon that. How do you do it? It's really, really hard and it never ends, is the truth. And I'm getting the sense that You are, you are very fundamental to the, to the presence, the implementation, the delivery of a brand experience across the business. 100%. Right. Of which one part is a fabulous media plan connecting top of the funnel stuff. Look, don't get me wrong. I'm not like, oh yeah, let me tell you, Kevin, the brand, it was incredibly important. No, that's not me. I am absolutely at that high level, but very down to earth. And there's no big words in my brand strategy. There's no elongated sentences. It's about, sorry, what are we? What are we not? Yeah. How can we create? How can we be as creative as possible? But then when I go to audience and I go top of the funnel, how do I link that to mid-funnel? How do I link that to bottom of the funnel sales? I'm all about the data. I want to know. And I'm a pain because I am precise and I have a weird sense of numbers. And that's how everything is like. When I share a report with the board, we do economic analysis for 20 years of data. I can prove I can disaggregate recession from pricing, from partner hires, et cetera, et cetera, to say, no, no, no, when we spent that on the Financial Times, here's what the return was. I have to do that every day because they're lawyers. So I'm glad you said that because you've teed up where I wanted to go with this. And that is you've introduced the concept, you've been very generous in explaining how it works and how you work in an operational way. And I was a bit nervous about being reductive, but I think you've said that's as you like. And you've mentioned it there, your brand strategy doesn't have long words and et cetera. I'm interested, how does the implementation work? What tools, what mechanisms, how do you apply the method so that everyone gets it? And look, so for reference, lots of businesses will have a brand strategy playbook or a brand storybook or, you know, those sorts of things. Is that something that exists at Michelin Dorea or is it, are you, you're smiling, right? So I'm guessing the answer is no. Tell me how it works in practice. Life is messy and I can be as structured as I like and I'm a really structured person. The only way I can be creative personally is when I have the metaphoric and the literal clear desk. That's how I work. And I may have 1,000 things to do, but if I always, I'm an hour away from cracking a problem. Yeah. Hopefully with people to help me, usually because I need them. I have many documents. I have, of course, I have a brand strategy one-pager, our brand model. I have brand guidelines from a visual point of view. I have a one-pager around our integrated funnel strategy. I have a grid. My communications directors are ex-directors of communications at the Houses of Parliament. So the grid is what the government uses to better or worse effect, depending on how it's gone a few weeks ago. Keir didn't have a good immigration week, but he's not having a bad trade week. It goes like that. So the grid ensures that all the demands on the business from a communications point of view and from an event point of view and anything, where we externalize the brand, all captured in one place online the whole time. Yeah. Everyone's contributing. I have hundreds of pieces of content that have a way of weaving their way through the business. So I have all those things. I have presentations on each of the buckets I talked to you about in terms of what we're doing with clients, what we're doing with all that. Fee earners are under huge pressure. It's a serious business earning too much money, whoever you are. And lawyers earn a lot of money. That's not Mishcon Law, that's just lawyers. There's real serious pressure that comes with that. It's not a joke. So I know that my lawyers rarely read the stuff I share with them. My chance in front of them is one way to do it as well. But I put those together because I want at any one time, if any lawyer asks, have you got this? Could you help me understand that? I do. But the truth is, Kevin, there's deep misunderstanding all the time. Yeah. And I get really frustrated. I'm using that word rather than some other more powerful words. Stronger words. So all the structure in the world, and there are a lot of things that we use. Last, 2 weeks ago, I think maybe it was last week, I did a town hall about the new articulation. This week it's happening. The new articulation of our brand strategy. We've got some new films coming out which will infuse everything. We've got some big briefs coming out around things we need to do in the innovation economy, things we need to do with big corporates, things about our disputes practice, which sits underneath the big brand stuff. I spent 40 minutes describing to the whole firm where this story has gone since 1937 when we founded. You can never communicate enough. I kind of joke about the power of overcommunication and I always cite my Jewish and in, there's a lot of things said about the Jewish, wonderful Jewish people. One of the things is that Jewish mums have a funny rep, which is they like to ask lots of questions and talk a lot. If you both ask questions and talk a lot in a professional service environment, you do well. So I have constantly tried to communicate, but you never do enough. So yes, I have structure. Yes, I share them. I share presentations around econometrics and I do all this. It doesn't go in. And there's a handful of people that get it and the rest of them just think, I wish you'd just leave me alone. Can't we just do what we need to do? There's a recognition when pennies drop for different partners at different times and then they become advocates. And then they say, no, no, before you do that, just go and talk to Elliot or go and talk to one of his team. So the implementation is really hard. We run 150 events a year. Some are stellar, some should be better. Was it ever thus? You have someone coming back going, that didn't work, that didn't work. I said, all right, fine, let's talk about how we're going to do that better then. So the truth is it's only okay for 3 minutes after the thing that went well. And it's never— when I worked at Procter Gamble, one of the big things that my boss used to say was, you've got to keep the idea sold. You create the campaign, you do whatever it is, but you've got to keep going. I'm sure we don't do enough to quote unquote keep the campaign sold, but it's very hard to go off piste. What I would say is there are controls in it. When I find, I mean, I'm, I think I'm a bit difficult. I've been told, and I get a bit irritated when people come up with really stupid ideas and they try and execute them. And so that's my own failing is both being a bit too hard about what isn't acceptable, isn't right for the brand, and falling in love with my own ideas a bit too much, which is natural. We all do. Yeah. And that bit, you, as long as I'm, and I usually pull it out, I usually don't muck up too much, but that is an ongoing thing, which is, I know it's a slightly blancmange answer, but there isn't either a deck of stuff or an ongoing conversation. It's a bit of both. And it gives the assurity that we know what we're doing. Yeah. Because that's the bit that lawyers, if they smell that you don't know, it's over. But the opposite is also true. And lawyers trust experts because they're experts. Absolutely. You've described a lot of interesting things there, some which has seemed asked me some questions. Sorry, the one about how you take people with you, you know, your point about overcommunication, I think, is a really good one. And it's not a Blumong answer at all, I don't think. I think it's very pragmatic and realistic. In our experience, and we've seen this, sometimes when you start working with a new client and they give you their brand strategy or their brand book, and I don't mean guidelines, visual guidelines have to be obviously specific and all the Byron Sharp stuff about being distinctive and consistent and visual assets and whatever, fine. But there does seem to be a direct correlation between the longer and the more verbose the sort of the brand strategy, the more divorced it seems to be from the reality of the business. And you've described a business that is very much where the brand and the business at large are indivisible. And your point about culture early on, brand, business, and therefore the culture underpinning it. Yeah. Our town hall was not about the brand campaign. Our town hall was about core values and the brand. We're a core values-driven business. We put them in place 25 years ago. We've just edited them ever so slightly, restated them. The conversation between James, managing partner, and me, and then we have 3 fionas, 3 partners, talking about what those look like in action. That was a conversation that was just totally natural. And I don't know in how many other law firms or professional service firms the two would've been put together because I am, for better or for worse, at the centre of things. And that's critical to understanding why It isn't an adjacent thing. It isn't ancillary. It isn't over there. It's in the middle. So I started where I did about what I think the brand is about. I think what you have described is relatively rare, if that makes sense. It seems to be, but it seems to be bleeding obvious. If you want to help your business grow, then you work these things out. There are two— this is going back a bit now, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, two professional services firms, one law firm that both really embraced the concept that was very voguish at the time, which is about business purpose and going beyond the fundamental responsibilities of ESG to becoming a more purpose-driven or purpose-led business, which is quite a challenge in a law firm, I think. But the law firm actually, they went about it in a very pragmatic way, right? Because they tried it. And it didn't work. And that was because it was driven top-down. And so the reason they got us in was to run a program that would help them to understand where the blockages were, understand where the need to communicate was, and to design that program for them to implement it more effectively. And there's just a couple of things on that. And the first thing is just again on building, I want to talk about just for a moment that purpose piece because I think our essence or our, I think we call it, we might even call it purpose or mission is connected to to not an ESG version, but something similar, because there is a challenge with ESG. But just to let you know, when we talked about our new brand campaign, I spent 6, I said, I think I did 6 partner meetings going through the new work with everybody before it even made the town hall. And there were nips and tucks, really important nips and tucks on the way. Without that, I needed to cover off 220 partners. I had to. So I am, I can be a little pushy and a little punchy, but I absolutely know I need to bring people with me, obviously. And it gets harder as you get bigger. There's less and less people who are aware of what you're doing and more and more people are sceptical about it. And they're so divorced and they're so busy. Just on the purpose thing. So our version of that is, which we put in, in 2017, we started talking about it. We said we enable our people and our clients or our clients and our people to shape the world's possibilities, which is, sounds on one level a bit nebulous, but the reason we chose that language was it was about enabling, which is important. That's more than facilitation. It's not quite, it's not as didactic as, it's not telling people what to do. It's enabling, giving them the tools to do it. Clients and people, because without our whole core value piece is set up to say we help individuals realise their potential so they stay at Mishcon. But it's also obviously about clients being enabled to help shape. Shaping is a nice way around saying you're in a litigation, what do you want the outcome to be? That's very different to a fundraise. What do you want the outcome to be? It's very different to a reputation issue. What do you want the outcome to be? But shaping is a really, I love the word shape. I think it gives you lots of room and it's different for every individual and organisation. To shape the world's possibilities, you go, wow, that feels pretty aspirational. But it also enables us to talk about issues around climate, issues around diversity and equity and all those things. As the godfather-in-chief across the other side of the pond goes off on his merry frolic, changing his mind every 3 seconds. I don't care what he says. Yeah. Our business doesn't care. We are going to do what we need to do for our people. We're going to do what we think is right for the community. We're going to do what we think is right for the environment. He can do what he likes. That's easy for me to say. I'm part of the management of a UK law firm with obviously clients in the US, but we don't have the issues over there. Though I would like to think we would have told, we would have been professional, but we would have stood up to what he was doing. We wouldn't have caved like some of the other firms. Again, easy for me to say. Not easy if you are in those firms and you are running them. So that purpose thing is really important, but don't go down a rabbit warren is what we experienced, especially around some specific initiatives we were trying to do. You can't always, onboarding clients, the types of clients you do, you are not a white knight on a white horse. You're just not. You're a law firm that represents clients. So I'd like to move it on to a slightly different angle on this, and that is You've touched a couple of times on the individuals that make up a partnership. And there's something that we see and which is increasingly becoming a thing, which is where partners or employees are encouraged to be the voice of the business, particularly in social media or on speaking platforms or in circumstances like this. And the— I'm kind of interested in the potential tension between those personal branding opportunities and how they either help or hinder the firm. And we— there are— I'll give you an example. There's two totally different businesses that we worked with recently, one where it was like pulling teeth getting their people to do anything that would directly promote or raise the profile of the organization. And on the other hand, it was about containing, or— no, containing is the wrong word, but it was about encouraging partners to actually stick to the script, for want of a better phrase. So is that a challenge with you at Mishcon, the kind of the individuals and their personal voices versus what you want to say as a firm? So we have a strategy and it's a strategy I developed very early on, which said, and it was actually, I learned this from my, the chair and the founder of the agency I worked for, Liga Stellani, it's a guy called Tim Delaney, who's one of the icons in the advertising world. And he said, great brands talk. And even before social media, they were running, my old agency was running the Adidas campaign globally, some brilliant work. They created tons of content before content was a thing. Yeah. And they did that because they wanted to say, hello, we're here. We're not Nike. We're here. And it kept going and it kept going and it kept going. And eventually Adidas turned themselves around and they were growing like bulyo. Partly attitudinal, partly media planning and all that, but actually partly to do with just the amount they spoke. So when I joined Mishcon, I was very clear that I felt that one of the strategies we needed to bake in was that we're going to talk. That we're going to put our head above the parapet, that we're going to do it consistently on issues that matter with a business first, law second approach. Business first, law second, because my positioning for the business, for the Mishcon business was private client law firm, but actually 90% of what we do is business. We're a law firm throughout a business. Okay, what does that now mean? A law firm throughout a business means we'll talk about business issues. Yeah. You then identify key spokespeople against the various issues that you want to talk about. You then brief them properly and they talk about a fraud in country X followed by the legal issue. They talk about the issue with culture and how that affects the way that people treat each other and employment issues. And then you look at the issue from an employment law perspective. Yeah. We did that as a strategy. So I have encouraged, and then we created content and it was really hard in the beginning 'cause people are like, I don't wanna do this. Ripple dissolved to 2025. There's enough content to sink a battleship. We need to reformat it, make it better. We need to be more choiceful. We need to link it into the funnel. We need to do a lot more with it. I have some people who have got some really decent profile on LinkedIn. Thank you, those people, because you know what? They want to bother sending stuff out every couple of days. One of them does it on data and freedom of information. One of them does it on the hostages that we've been acting for in the crisis at the moment in the Middle East. One of them is a little bit less organized and less rigorous and less disciplined. So, you know, it's the old have a word. Yeah. And you have a word and you're straight and you look your partner in the eye and you say, I'm going to objectivize you for a moment and talk about this person on LinkedIn that does these posts. Not you, the human, because I really like you. That person is doing too much silly stuff. It's denigrating the brand. That person is not behaving in a way that I think is appropriate for a partner. That person needs to dial up the business stuff and dial down the Dial down the personal stuff. There's one or two people in the last 15 years I've had to have that conversation with. The rest, it's brilliant. I need people to do that. There's no issue. I'm quite careful with what I do. I do get asked, luckily, to contribute. It's not about me. If it's interesting what I say, well, that's great. But I'm a function of the brand from a Mishcon point of view. There's no other reason to do this other than to say, I'm part of a business which is really well run. So if someone watches this, listens to it and goes, I wouldn't mind working with him, or they've got a different view, that's fantastic for Brown Mishcon. As long as people are clear and not selfish and they're not egomaniacs, it's fine. In general, we've had more and more over the years with lots of rigour on the whole, a little bit here and there that doesn't quite work, but generally people behave well and if they don't, I have to talk to them, but it's not very often. So I don't have any issue at all. I need individuals to have a view and to be interesting. Because here's the thing, top-down expertise doesn't work. People want specificity of expertise. 650 lawyers, 650 universes of expertise, 36 practices, 36 areas of expertise, 10 countries. You don't want to get a generalist to go and fix the carburetor on your car. You'll go to a mechanic. Yeah. So it's very simple. I don't mind that at all. And anyone that does is being silly about what control means. It's not, it doesn't work like that. That's not how we buy stuff. And again, I'm just a common sense person. Who would I want to buy from? That's exactly, I put myself in the shoes of people that buy legal services. It's a big purchase. It's really expensive. I can't afford Michelin beret. Yeah. So you better make it right. So that's partly saying, here's your space. Give people agency, give them enough rope and all that, but rein them in if you need to. But that's my approach to being a coach at the sidelines of a football team that needs to play a certain way, but with some space to express. Excellent. So no hairdryer effect, just, you know, occasionally. Yes. Okay. Things may have been thrown metaphorically, obviously never literally, Kevin. Yeah. I might have raised my voice a few times, but that's because I care. And then, by the way, raising your voice is never a good idea. But yeah, there is, there is, there's sometimes some really, really tough conversations, but not that often. I'd like to move it then to what you said right at the start when I asked you about branding. You've, you immediately zeroed in on the topic, the objective of growth. Yeah. And throughout the conversation, you've made reference to the funnel and the role of different activities at different points in the funnel. You also mentioned econometrics and the ability to demonstrate what impact certain activity has on the bottom line for the business. Can you expand a bit on that and just the relationship between brand and growth? Sure. Yeah. So I have a very simple mantra, which is you've got to measure everything. Which doesn't sound the most creative thing that I'm going to say today. But actually, if you do that, then you're more likely to be able to invest more money. Because if you're smartly investing with creativity, with elan, with panache, you're going to be able to show that growth comes. So I break everything down into, it's an old P&G thing or Procter Gamble thing, which is that you need objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. And P&G used to call it OGSMs, a one-pager literally, which said objectives, What am I trying to do in words? Goals. What am I trying to do in numbers? Strategies. What strategies I'm going to employ? Measures. How am I going to measure it? So we do that everywhere. In client retention development, I have a segmentation analysis of every single one of my 5,500 clients a year. I have high value and premium, which are X, Y, and Z. I have low value. I have dormants. I have laps, all that stuff. Yeah. I'm able to tell you what percentage of each of those segments contributes to revenue. I can do the same with new business. Obviously, it's pretty easy. I can do the same with my digital sales campaigns, 20 going on right now. I'm going to do the same with the clicks on my 500,000 emails I send. Yeah, I have a scary amount of data on a live dashboard using Power BI that every day I can look at. I can look at cost of acquisition, all the stuff that you would think some strategic creative brand team is not interested in. It's absolutely the opposite. On top of that, So day-to-day analysis, campaign-by-campaign analysis. We've just repitched our media business, and I think we've got some great partners that we're going to be working with. If I'm doing that the whole time, then I can keep my team focused and I can keep the business focused. And then it's a kind of judicious sharing of those data points. But the kind of metrics, I've employed a third party over— we've done it twice now over the last couple of years. Given them enough data to sink a battleship so that I could get a sense of, is this stuff really working? So I come to budget and I say, actually, I'm going to need X million, not Y million. I'm not just talking out of my whatevers. It's too easy to go, well, brand's really important. It's not if it's crap. It's not if you've got no ideas. It's not if you've got no rigor. It's not if it's not performing a role. If it's not performing a role, I don't want to work at Michelin doing what I do. I'd rather just go about my merry way and my own business. I need it to work, otherwise I can't sleep at night. Yeah. So it comes from a place of rigor because I'm a, and this is the interesting thing, Kevin, again, enlightened business. I became a partner, senior partner in Mishfonder in 2017. When you do that and you become an owner, it's not that people treat you differently, is that you treat your role differently and you feel the responsibility. If I'm spending £100 of my partner's money, including me, it better be returning me some money. Brand, Smart investment in brand and smart and campaigns that work can drive not just revenue, but of course margin. I'm justifying price points. We have no right to win in markets that we win in. We have no right to be able to play in 35 different markets. If I was Kirkland Ellis or Latham Watkins, they do one, well, they do a number of things really well. They're brilliant. They're huge firms. Mainly it's M&A, big ticket M&A. If you're another law firm, you're Quinn Emanuel, you're brilliant at litigation. We play in so many places that I have to have a very dexterous, agile brand. And that takes thought. And that takes numbers. And if it's not working, we change tack really quickly. I mean, I kind of almost wish I'd had loads more failures because I don't think we're pushing enough. I don't think we're edgy enough. And that's my thing. It's like people think we're edgy and actually it's not. All the brand does is reflect the truth of how we lawyer. Yeah. It just happens to be edgy. I'm not sure I would have been, anyone else would have hired me in the legal industry. It's not, yes, of course I've got a playbook. But it happens to be that there's no distance between my personality, between the lawyer's personality and what we say about a brand. That's probably why it works and probably why we're sitting having this conversation. Yeah. Because there is that on a personal level. And that sort of edginess. And there is a perception out there of Mishcon as being perhaps bolder than all the others. We were called the punk rockers of the legal industry when we took on the government twice and won twice. We are seen as, you know, we did the black cab thing against, we are doing the black cab class action against Uber. And literally the line in one of those comment sections in the FT is, Mishcon, full stop, again, of course Mishcon. We are that firm and may that continue. I love that. I don't, I want, you know, I don't, I'm not Millwall, if you're a football manager, but I really don't care. You're Crystal Palace. I'm, Palace is good. Good old Palace. Yeah, I'm an Arsenal fan, but I'm really happy for Palace. But you are, you've got to be, there's a great, when I lived in India for a couple of years, I was a production company. And the line was, I think they were called, we are like this only. Mishkon is like this only. There's a beautiful little Indian English expression, we are like this only. That is who we are. And I've just been fortuitous enough to have found my people and then been able to have the privilege of being able to every day bring that proposition to life. Yes. Yeah. Since we agreed a date for this podcast, which has mostly been in the diary for some time, I've had a few conversations with people in the sector where I've mentioned it. And I detect some professional jealousy there whenever you talk about Mishkundareya, right? In the context of brand and marketing, et cetera. Because I think if you're in the sector and you're in that kind of role or have that kind of responsibility. But it comes to your very first point. I've not interviewed a chief brand officer because there's been a CMO and a this and that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The disaggregation on the structural level is really stupid. Right. It's really stupid. Okay. Tell me more about that. Trust the person. You've got to find a person who can do it, but trust that person to be in the middle of the business who combines and can have a view on the way that you treat clients, the way that you treat intermediaries, the way that you project your brand in more traditional marketing sense and comms. When you say, oh, you know what, the client person is a partner and they sit in there in the partnership. Okay, that's good. So are they going to talk to a marketing person? No, well, they think the marketing person's stupid. You wouldn't do that, would you? When it comes to new business, no, no, we have a great new business when it's like, that's nothing to do with the brand. That's just going to win new business. It's so dumb. The world is not like that. And you don't need externalities. A consistent set of externalities come when you've got someone who's got a sense of what's happening. It doesn't mean, by the way, that we don't get it wrong. And I look at pitch decks sometimes and I go, how did that happen? And I'm really irritated, but that's a function of size and scale and all the best systems in the world and tech here and project management says, I'm going to fix that. That's just because people just want to do their own thing and ignore the old man who's getting angry again and about to give me the hairdryer treatment. I need there to be a bit of fear. I don't mean that rudely. I don't mean it personally. I want people to care that I'm not trying to constrain them. I'm trying to make it better. And if you don't have someone who's given the authority to do that, you will end up where most professional service firms are. Brilliant professionals let down by the brand. Not because the brand people aren't good, the marketing people aren't good, but because they've only got one sliver. You've got to integrate the thing. That would be my— if I, if, as and when I get asked to, and I occasionally get asked by managing partners to just natter with them about what we how we do it. That's what I say. But they've got to bring their partnership along with them. Or they've got to say to their partnership, no, we're a business and we need to be professionally run and this is how we're going to do it. So the integration point to me is obvious. I think we're in the best examples or circumstances at the moment. I think there is a move in some quarters away from viewing marketing as the veneer that you put on the business. In B2B, to a recognition that certainly the assets that you create, whether they are events or some of the things that you do, the formats, whether it's the Jazz Shapers show or whether it's the work you do with— is it The Economist you do now next with you? That these are not just shiny objects, they are strategic assets or things that drive value for the business. And I'm seeing and hearing more of that kind of worldview, vocabulary, et cetera, than perhaps I have in the past. And one of the sort of drivers of that, I think, is there are varying degrees of guru out there in relation to brand and branding. Now, a lot of them will be primarily consumer branding focus, although most of them are, that's the Aaron Burr Bass or Mark Ritson or whoever, they occasionally will turn the lens on B2B. You've spoken a lot from the inside out about how it works in terms of Michelin. Maybe just to change the pace a little bit, what's your view on those kind of gurus and their view of the brand and branding world? Do you side with anyone in particular? Does that create friction that you go against? Where do you stand on all that? No, I mean, I read as an interested student, but I don't think I subscribe to any one particular school at all. If I'm honest with you, I think it's really hard to write original thought about this space. I think so much of it again is back to the implementation. Yeah. Based on really understanding, excuse me, a business, which is why I've said since going inside of a business, it's actually really easy to look in the mirror and ask the client what they think. I recall having run an agency and having some great clients, on a good day, 75% of what you do is listened to, and on a bad day, it's 25%. Yeah. And that's quite frustrating. And there's plenty of smart people advising clients, but they've got— every client's got their own agenda and their own issues, their own internal politics. It's not because they're not smart, it's just there's a practical reality. So no, there's no one person that I— or school of thought. I think I go back to Porter's Five Forces. I go back to, you know, Tom Peters on innovation or Built to Last. Some of these books which I consumed, or Davidson on marketing. This was like, I remember starting advertising, going to my bosses, tell me some stuff I can read. 'Cause I'd studied politics and Spanish. Yeah. I had great instincts. I could tell you out of 100 ads, which ad was the right ad, and I could tell you what, which strategy was good. But I didn't know about marketing and about pricing and all that. No, I don't have anyone that I go, wow, but I get tidbits. If they're good, then they're good. I also think that it's, of course, there's principles. If you meet good professionals and you work with great agency partners, and I'm lucky enough that I think I do, I've got some great people. They come with ideas and they come with newness and they come with challenge. There's a couple of agencies. One of our agencies is a content communication agency called BBD Perfect Storm, award-winning agency. I've worked with the CEO and founder, Jason Fu, for many years since we were both running other agencies. He challenges me, their team challenges me, and that's right. Yeah, that's where I'm going to learn. And we've just appointed a new media agency, same media, digital media, digital media agency. They seem fantastic. I definitely, I'm persuadable, massively persuadable because what do I bloody know? That's how I view it. So it's not, I get nervous I'm not learning enough and I do, I mentioned AI briefly. I think it, I'm 54 now, so I don't know if I'm still in an executive role in 10 years, well great. But if not, then so be it. There's a real fear for me that I'm not going to harness it enough for my team. Not the opposite, like, oh, keep away from it. It's not that. It's really taking advantage of what this might mean in terms of the way that we interact with clients. I think we don't, we're not using anything like enough in terms of the way that we just serve up information in our own business, in terms of a way that we can scale content quickly and do alpha, beta, and gamma tests on different creative. There's a whole bunch of things that we could be doing that we will do. I'm sure we do use it, but it's That to me is, I know it's implementation stuff, but I think it's existential. That to me is sort of more interesting than is someone going to come along with a new strategy on how to synthesize your social with your ex. I'm not really, I don't know that that's going to help me. And related to that point and looking outside the organization, are there any other businesses that you admire what they're doing or that you take inspiration from in your role, in your set of responsibilities? I don't know if in the category there are, I must be honest, but that might be my ignorance rather than the fact that they're not doing really cool stuff. I don't know that. I'm always an admirer of anyone that starts their own thing. And the Jazz Shapers thing is about founders. It's no coincidence that I really enjoy doing that because I think it takes a hell of a lot of courage and gumption to set up your own business. So I think there's lots of really interesting startups, whether it's in legal tech, or whether it's in just me, content and digital, that are doing interesting things. But there's no one brand that I go, I have massive respect for some of the big brands like EY. Those are machines. Yes. Hundreds of thousands of people. It's clear what they're trying to do. I'm not obviously into the funnel stuff because I just see the high-end brand stuff. But no, there's no one in particular. It's just when I see something great, you have to experience it. And as a potential buyer, which I'm not, I'm sure you would see it. So if you were asking a potential buyer of legal services, they would say, well, these people do that and that, and it's really smart. But a lot of it, as I've learned along the years, is the functional delivery of a really good service. Yeah. Which totally flies in the face of investing a penny in brand. Yeah. But my challenge back to that is, yeah, but if everyone in the top 50 law firms are delivering at a functionally similar level, how are we going to differentiate ourselves? Absolutely. It's very simple. Yeah. And we've got to give ourselves the chance of differentiation. Otherwise we're just another mid-sized law firm that's going to get squeezed. Yeah. You mentioned the radio show Jazz Shapers, and I've mentioned to you before, my business partner Mark Maddox is an ex-publisher of Blues and Soul magazine. He's a big fan of it. He's the fan. Yes, Kevin, the listeners, the listeners. He's your listener. He is my listener. My mum listens. Mum does listen. There's two of them. I— look, it's, it's a really strong format. Obviously it's been going for several, several years now. 12, 12 years. And I read, I read about it before I met you, and I think part of the genius of it is the distribution. You're— I read somewhere about you're reaching something like the profile of the Jazz FM audience is there's like a 40% crossover, which is why we did it. That was the Radio 4 crossover was the reason. It was a, it was a numbers-driven choice. That was it. It was actually 42% at the time of all Jazz FM listeners listen to Radio 4. I Can't Buy Radio 4, now it's around 39 or something, but That's a significant slug. Yes. And it's not Classic FM, which has a similar number. Classic FM is much bigger distribution, much too expensive. Jazz FM has an audience of half a million a month. So it's affordable. Quick digression. I'm reminded there's a terrific book written by the Scotsman Stuart Cosgrove called Detroit '67. And it's all about the Detroit riots and the overlap with music and what have you. And he includes in it a quote from Berry Gordy of Motown. Where he says, our success came when we realised we weren't in the music business, we were in the distribution business. So everyone was making great music, but most of them solved the distribution and got it into the hands of the listeners. Yeah, getting to the point, it's quite a pointed question. What does Jazz Shapers do for Mishcon Derea? When we created, when I joined the firm, there was an objective I set, which was that I wanted the business world to understand that Mishcon Derea was a law firm for the world of business. And that was a pivot from, you just do private client work. Don't you? And I took the way that we deliver client, private client work, which is with great levels of tenacity, smart brains, ability to deliver what I call the edge of what's possible, really unusual intelligence and strategy as a lawyer delivering those services. Imagine if we did that for businesses with the same sense of skin in the game, the same sense of grit and tenacity. Imagine if we did that for businesses, the, and that's what we've said we would do, And the thinking was that most corporate, or at least our thesis was corporate clients receive faceless corporate lawyers doing the work for them. And we said, ain't gonna be like that. So if I did that and I'm trying to create the understanding and the belief that we are a law firm for order of business, what are the things that we can do to bring that to life? One thing was, why don't we just be outrageous and do something with the Financial Times? Now the law firms used to have done that. So we created a content partnership. We had no right to create a content partnership with the FT. Clifford Chance should have done that. Allen Overy should have done that. I don't just mean an I mean, actually, yeah, we created something called Deals and Dealmakers. We were a small, and we still are a relatively small M&A house. Then we created a programme called London in the World, loads of content, loads of supplements, loads of all sorts of stuff. One of the things that happened, came across my desk was someone saying, would you like to advertise these TV channels, which we'd set up online TV channels? Would you like to do that on Jazz FM? I'm like, no, but can we talk to you about a programme partnership? Then you dug in and you found that this audience was our audience. What it does for us is it positions us as someone who cares about entrepreneurs because we do, because a big part of who we act for are entrepreneurs. It does it in a, I always call it an of value way. Anything that we create shouldn't be gratuitous selling. It should be a sell predicated on giving something of use, of value, of utility. I believe naively that the third, the hour show, which is 26 minutes of talk, once a week, but now becomes 34 times a year. Giving that to an audience, insights around what a founder is like, what drives them, what their obstacles were, what resilience really looks like, all those truths, giving something of value positions us positively, predisposes us to an audience that might be interested in either continue to work with Mishkondren, feeling good about it, or actually appointing us. And all the tracking has shown that to be true. Huge levels of awareness, huge levels of more predisposition to Mishcon, levels of salience. They understand what we do. Yeah. I use some of the programs to talk about specifics around the law, to drive the Mishcon Academy digital sessions that we do. It's a brilliant platform. So what it does for us in tracking terms is huge. It's also weirdly delivered a direct return on investment. What it was meant to do was purely in awareness terms. It's delivered us business a lot. So for every pound we've spent, there have been new clients. And that's unusual. And it's small in the few million quid, but it's a return. So it isn't even a cost anymore, which is mad. So it's delivered a lot of things, but mainly there's a lot of, there's a talkability thing, which is before podcasts were podcasts, this was happening. And it's not a new idea anymore to have a podcast. And it's not a new idea to ask questions of founders, but we were there in the foothills. And I think it's got some loyalty to it. People like listening. They go, who's he gonna have on next? So it does a lot of things and it creates an excitement. It creates something you can offer your clients, which we do. 25, 30% of all the guests are our clients. We've got an investment product that we've developed with the Startup World where we invest our time for equity. Great way of saying, well, part of the package is you come on the, we have another, another programme called the Innovation Series. It's a baby one. We get them on that. Yeah. So there's a load of things that we do and it's, it ticks every single box. Will it go on forever? I don't know. And The reason I do it is not, it's really not about me. It's because I knew what I wanted the product to be. It's interesting that, that kind of early mover advantage is literally a huge advantage. I imagine it would be, it's not more difficult to launch an audio kind of own media format or platform now. It's obviously a lot easier than it was when you started, but it's a lot harder to build an audience perhaps. It is. And that's why, again, the insight was very simple. Take a station that's already got an audience. Yeah. Don't you build your podcast on your own? You self-publish, you might get 100 people. Yeah. Now volume isn't the only thing in business to business. You need value from 1 or 2 people, of course. But 50,000 people, Spotify, iTunes, British Airways Hi-Life. It's been on BA Hi-Life for the last 10 years. These are things which take it out of the ordinary where you get a managing partner of another law firm internationally ringing me and going, so you were in the FT that day. I saw something online with The Economist and then I heard your show. What the hell are you doing? Can I talk to you? And I'm like, of course you can talk to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a complicated playbook, just no one wants to do it. I interviewed Matthew Magee from Pinsent Masons late last year, and he was talking about Outlaw, which is their web platform, and is very much driven by the news agenda and what matters to their clients. And he made a good point, which is that it would be very difficult for another law firm to start that now because the economics of it, they're running with huge efficiencies, but it'd be a big investment for any business to start now. Elliott, we've been talking now for over an hour, and I could carry on for a long, long time, but you and I both have day jobs to get to. So I'm just going to wrap up with one question. Maybe you've touched on this a bit, but Mishcon is seen, perceived to be bold and what have you. It absolutely, from the outside in, is distinctive in a sector that's not really known for that. What advice would you give somebody trying to build a brand? Maybe not in the legal sector, you don't want to give them the rest an advantage, but in another kind of conservative sector where probity, sobriety, authority are the kind of the perceived principles that the business should be built on. So the number one thing every day of the week and Sunday is strategy. And having a sense of what your strategy ought to be. How you develop that is potentially important, though arguably you have the less people involved, the better, with some clever bit of advisory coming in. And what I mean by that is you need someone who has an understanding of what a strategy looks like, which kind of traverses brand and business. It's not one or the other. Number 2 is building consensus. I think it's critical. The only way you're going to get something going is if you take the time to advocate internally to the key people that either own the business, partners, or to other people that may be a management team. Yeah. And number 3, and I mentioned it, is I think if you're a management team listening or management person listening to this and you're not a marketing person, think structurally. Because if you reorganize how you think about where brand sits, then you've got a chance of putting it at the center and, and driving your economic engine. And then the fourth thing I guess is it's ongoing advocacy. The only way that I've ever sold any good ideas at Mishcon, and pretty much every single good idea has got through, is because I've used logic. I'm very rational and quite left-brained in the way that I present a story, an argument before I then show the creative idea. And there was this, I read this at last, I can't remember if it was maybe in this Tortoise, which is bought at The Observer, it was about Maybe it was something else. It was the lessons that we could learn from the way that Mark Carney dealt with Donald Trump, which was actually, as they called it, a masterclass in not getting his head kicked in. Yeah. And getting shouted at and Trump at his worst. He moved Trump into a position where Trump agreed with him on 2 or 3 key questions about real estate. Yeah. If you recall. Very simple thing. You know what the real estate market like. I do. Certain things aren't for sale. This isn't for sale. Buckingham Palace isn't for sale. You're right, they're not. Well, it's the same, Mr. President. I spoke to the owners of Canada and Canada's not for sale. Yeah. Ah, and he's like, oh shit, I've agreed to— Yeah. Oh, I can get it out. I've agreed with you. What am I going to do now? It is like that every time. It is a kind of Star Wars moment. Yeah. When you're trying to get into the bar and Luke Skywalker says to the stormtrooper, he goes, who are you? And he goes, they're with me. It's okay. It's okay. They're with me. And he goes, it's okay. They're with you. You've got to find ways to get people to agree with your strategy. So that then they buy these supposedly outlandish creative ideas. My last thing is the thing that worries me the most, the thing that everyone has to think about is genuinely being creative. And that is something I struggle with every day. I'm not sure if we're creative enough. No, I'm sure we're not creative enough. And I'm fearful and I want to find the next thing without it just being for its own sake. It's got to be interesting. As you get bigger, it gets much harder to do that because people are more conservative. And you have to work much harder. Not impossible, but that's actually my overriding thing is be creative, but base it in strategy, base it in structure, base it in advocacy. If you do all that, then you're all right. You've got a chance. That's great. Elliot, thanks so much. Pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers.