The look, feel, and voice of your brand all contribute to your firm’s identity kit. An identity kit is a set of standards and guidelines that ensure that everything published by your brand achieves a certain level of consistency. Consistency is key. You need everything your firm does to fall within your established identity.
An identity kit establishes and identifies three main elements of your firm’s messaging goals. Your firm’s look, the way your firm makes its clients feel, and your voice message are the factors that ensure your firm is noticed, recognized, remembered, and trusted.
Learn more about identity kits, their importance, and all of the elements that should be included in your firm’s identity kit so ensure consistent, on-brand messaging every time.
Your Firm’s Look
Your firm’s look may start as just a logo, but marketing is not ever that simple. Your firm logo is a symbol used to represent something about your firm; it is often used to identify a firm or the partner attorney’s name and prestige. Logos can also be used as a symbol to establish a firm’s attitude or evoke a feeling or create an attachment to the firm. As powerful as logos may be, they cannot solve every identity problem and fit every firm message’s nuance. Color choice is ever important to creating and establishing your firm’s identity.
Deciding on the colors representing your firm throughout its website, social media, printed material, and logos is an extremely important decision. Your firm may be able to take advantage of well-known color design principles such as the inherent professionalism of blue, the authority of greys, and the passion of reds. But for a truly unique color scheme that speaks to your firm’s identity, extensive research, trial & error, and a designer’s eye produce the best results.
Another factor for your firm to consider when establishing your identity kit should be typeface. Your firm’s marketing team should not underestimate the value that a typeface brings to your firm’s identity. Along with your firm’s logo and colors, the typeface that is chosen by your firm’s marketing team should continue to harness your firm’s message and identity and deliver it to your audience and clients. The idea is that the moment someone sees a bit of your owned media, whether that be your website homepage, blog, brochure, Twitter account, or ad, it feels familiar visually.
Your look needs to be well-defined for your team members, which is why an identity kit is such an essential tool for your firm. Telling your marketing team to “use the color blue” will get a general idea across to your designer, but the completed design may lack the impact or fail to relate to your audience. An identity kit will define the firm’s colors and may even provide reasoning for the color usage.
Example:
Our firm’s colors are Navy Blue (HEX #151CAF), representing our traditional, professional values and demeanor. Our supporting colors are a Light Grey (HEX #BBB7B7) and Classic White (HEX #FFFFFF), the pillars of our clean, simple, and authoritative law firm.
Our company typeface is Times New Roman, a classic font that is easy to read and works well in printed and digital media.
Your Firm’s Feel
A lot contributes to the feel of a brand. Look, tone and attitude all play a role. The best way to establish your firm’s feel is to ask yourself how you want clients to perceive you. Asking yourself how you would like your firm to make customers feel or look towards you is a great exercise, but implementing your firm’s vision may be difficult for established firms.
Do you want to be known as an empathetic legal team or a bullish, aggressive legal team? Once you have established how you want to be seen, make sure that everything you do, say, and publish is in service of that goal.
If your firm is still forming or relatively new, it can be easier to pivot your firm’s identity towards your vision. But if your firm is already established and has a reputation, it might be better to ask yourself and your partners, employees, and clients how they view your firm and align your firm’s look and message to reflect better your firm’s outside perception and your firm’s goal. Asking other stakeholders their opinions on your firm’s feel and messaging can be invaluable research to help your firm identify its look and the feelings it is attempting to evoke and make connections to.
Another element of your firm’s identity kit that is meant to showcase your firm’s feel are moodboards and image examples. Moodboards are a collection or collage of images intended to convey a general idea or feeling about something, in this case, your firm. Image examples are also an excellent element to include in your identity kit that can help your marketing team pick the right images to represent your firm online and in print.
Your Firm’s Voice
Your firm’s voice informs everything you write and say. Your website, interviews, guest blog posts, and email communications all contribute to your firm’s voice and, in large part, its messaging. It is best to define this early, which is why it should be documented in the identity kit. Showing strong examples of messaging and voice within your firm’s identity kit will help your marketing team and everyone in your firm to set standards on messaging. Ensure that your website, social media, and even printed materials present themselves with as much authority and compassion as your firm does when helping clients. It is important to understand that every individual has a unique voice and no two communication pieces will be exactly in line. Instead, think of your firm’s voice as a guiding principle.
Once you have a look, feel, and voice defined, your firm will have a strong identity. Documenting these elements in an identity kit will ensure that your firm’s best foot is forward online and off. A marketing team can help your firm define its identity, create its identity kit, and deploy your firm’s message. They can even help your firm expand its voice into underserved communities by expanding and adapting your messaging to new languages and new cultures.
