At this year’s International B2B Marketing Awards, law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s ‘We can’t tell fortunes, but we can protect them’ campaign beat all the competition to take home the overall Grand Prix – not to mention Gold in the Best use of direct mail and a Bronze in the Best limited-budget campaign categories (the team also won a Bronze and a Silver for its ‘Elephants in apartments’ campaign for good measure).
The campaign was aimed at high-net worth individuals in the Far East, to raise awareness of a brand new legal service the firm had launched designed to reduce the cultural concerns that surround divorce in the region. Central to this were two pieces of direct mail, which involved sending fortune cookies, tea and kau cim sticks to its audience (you can read the full case study here). The result? A 1400% return on investment.
Judges hailed the campaign as “an exemplar for B2B marketing creativity in law firms… This entry oozed cultural affinity, sensitivity and emotional intelligence rarely seen at this level in the wider B2B space”.
I caught up with Brian Macreadie and Verity Sleeman to find out how they did it.
How did it feel to scoop the top prize at the Awards?
Verity: We’ve had a campaigns team at BCLP for more than three years. The Awards night felt like a culmination of the changes and ways of working we’ve been implementing as a team, and getting the whole team to matrix behind these really ambitious projects – it was amazing, an incredibly special moment.
Brian: I’ve been joking that our mums are so incredibly proud! This is definitely one of my career highlights. I’ve been fortunate to be a judge of these Awards previously, and I’ve sat in the judging room and seen how passionate and heated it gets at times, and know first-hand how hard it is to win. We’re completely staggered to win the Grand Prix. It took us ages to get on stage, because we were still sat at the table saying ‘did they really call our name?’.
We’re a small team working on modest budgets, and this was as difficult a brief as we’ve ever had, to come home with the Grand Prix we were so proud.
When you propose a bold campaign such as this, do your stakeholders need a lot of convincing to go ahead with it?
Verity: Absolutely not. We work with partners who are ambitious and creative. They love something that’s going to make them stand out in a crowded market, because they’re on the front line and they feel those business pressures. It’s a nice problem to have, but we’re going to be getting a lot more requests for campaigns!
Brian: When we present these ideas to partners, we tend to present two to five concepts, and the past couple of campaigns we’ve done it’s always been the punchiest concept that’s been picked – and that tells you a lot.
"When we latched onto that empathetic connection with the client base, and we realised our service was there to help with that, we became so bought into it and moved by it, the marketing became easy"
Where do you start with a campaign like this one, where it’s a brand new product, you don’t know the prospects, and the market is 6000 miles away?
Verity: We’ve got local marketers out in Asia, and worked hand in glove with the legal team who really gave us a good download on the market, the targets, their motivation, challenges, existing clients’ back stories, how family law cases really work and case studies from their experience to really understand how this works for the end-client.
Brian: We spent hour after hour with this lead partner with probing questions to really immerse ourselves. Divorce is a topic that is quite easy to get your head around. It was easy for Verity, me and the team to develop a rapid sense of empathy, but it was particularly important to understand the cultural nuances, given we are so far away.
Anyone who’s spent any time in Asia understands the concept of honour and ‘face’. There was a breakthrough moment we noticed when people have their honour ripped to shreds in public – and that is making young people reconsider marriage – it’s wrong people are entering marriage with such doubts. When we latched onto that empathetic connection with the client base, and we realised our service was there to help with that, we became so bought into it and moved by it, the marketing became easy.
How did you decide on the particular channels and tactics for this campaign?
Verity: We wanted something impressive and personal that brought the fortune telling theme to life theatrically, which led us to the direct mail, which were the two centerpieces of the campaign in Asia and London. We investigated a number of different fortune telling practices. At the outset and each decision point we were always considering how they’d go down culturally. That’s a new mindset to get yourself into as a previously UK-centric marketer.
Brian: Something we learned was fortune cookies are a western invention and not culturally relevant in Asia. So we used fortune cookies for westerners, and tea reading with the local targets.
When we were told to launch with such a small budget, we were worried how to break into this high-net worth market. Our initial reaction was we would have to sponsor something huge. But we realised at that luxury end of the market, you can’t compete with the lavish hospitality and luxury that these guys are accustomed to. Actually having a small budget wasn’t a hindrance, because we were never going to have the budget to break into those luxury circles, so we knew we needed to get in touch with them personally, and because of the intelligence of the audience it had to be clever and fun.
Verity: Weirdly it was a blessing in disguise that the limited budget drew us closer to the original creative message. It let us hone in on the DM, distil it, make it sing with the message, and it became so simple and clever that the cleverness cut through.
"At the outset and each decision point we were always considering how they’d go down culturally. That’s a new mindset to get yourself into as a previously UK-centric marketer"
Why do you think it resonated with the target audience?
Brian: Ultimately where I think it resonated was it was the right product for a very serious societal and business issue for these guys, and we just found a really simple brand promise for that and brought it to life in a simple way. It’s a classic example of the right product, told the right way in the right format, and you don’t need a huge budget for that if you’ve got the right combination of those.
There have been campaigns in the past that have given me a sleepless night before launch, but we all felt so confident on this idea we didn’t feel particularly nervous. We just felt we were onto something, and felt we were making a difference.
How does winning the award boost the team internally?
Verity: It’s a huge confidence builder – that you can forge new ground, that no challenge is too great.
Brian: We’ve all heard the jokes that law firms are where marketers go to die, and that it’s not at the vanguard of marketing – and that pisses me off! We’re a modern business in a modern industry, and when we’re up against the calibre of other companies that have won, I’m proud that law firm marketing is out there mixing it with them!
Verity needs to take a huge amount of credit for project managing, delivering, and writing most of the content in the campaign. The job of the marketing leader is to make sure your team has an environment to think big, and be rewarded for it – and if you think bigger, you can achieve it.
