No, not you.

That’s the title of a book I just finished by author Mark Stevens.

In it, Mr. Stevens puts forth one central theme: if every dollar you spend on marketing does not return more than one dollar in sales, your marketing sucks.

I think a lot of people think of marketing as an expense of doing business. We advertise because all our competitors are advertising. We do it because we have to. The book says it is necessary to scrap that way of thinking.

One thing that I have definitely been guilty of is looking at the competition first before coming up with ideas for a marketing campaign. When a law firm asks me to come up with a web site or ad campaign, I would look at what their competitors are doing. I would say to myself “Okay, if the other firms are creating clever, professional looking ads, I want to create something that one-ups them.”

Wrong way of thinking. Instead of the original goal (create a campaign that gets us new clients), the new goal is: create a campaign that looks better than our rival. It has shifted from something based on a measurable strategy to an ego-driven ideal. Bad.

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about law firm marketing is: Everyone looks the same. And sometimes that’s the goal of a law firm. The firm wants to be seen as an equal, so they set out to look like the competition.

When I think of this, I picture boxes of store brand cereal.

In the cereal aisle, having a box that looks like the name brand makes sense. The store brand has the exact same product, so they try to look similar (even though kids know the difference!).

But should a law firm do that?

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