Episode 27: How to cultivate a brand during adversity with Grant Thornton’s Lucy Canning

DR: Hi Lucy! Thanks for joining us today. Before we begin, can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Grant Thornton?

LC: I’m Lucy Canning and I’m the brand, marketing and business development director at Grant Thornton. I’ve been with Grant Thornton for 13 years now and have had three other roles over that time that have ultimately led me to this position, which I took on in 2018. Before Grant Thornton, I worked in similar roles in a smaller competitor, and before I started my career, I did a degree in Ancient and Medieval History at the University of Birmingham. I have a just turned four-year-old son, Sam, who keeps me busy outside of work. I live in North London, near Hampstead Heath – so spend a lot of time up there. I love running and walking. And if I ever get time, I like to paint.

At GT, I lead a team of around 130 people across all of the disciplines you’d expect to see in a large team like this – from strategic marketing to Pursuits to client voice and our digital marketing team.

DR: Covid-19 has affected everyone’s industry, and some more than others (i.e. travel), but what’s been the impact on professional services this past year, and Grant Thornton specifically? Furthermore, how have you been overcoming this impact?

LC: I think we all assumed the worst or at least planned for the worst when the pandemic started. As a business, we were quick to respond and consider how we needed to adapt to manage our business through such an unpredictable and uncertain time. Our people responded brilliantly and our IT infrastructure and related support and education meant we really easily transitioned to doing business in a virtual world – and we found that we were able to maintain strong levels of client service and interaction throughout. It’s hard to generalise obviously, but I think clients have looked more to their professional advisors during the last year – as sounding boards, to try and learn via their advisors what others are doing to get through this. And so I think the professional services have had the opportunity to really step up and be there for their clients at a time of need.

In terms of our business, there were of course challenges for us in 2020, the year didn’t play out at all how we expected it to at the start of the 2020 – it didn’t for anybody – we had to recalibrate several times. But we came out strong and we’ve had a brilliant start to this year across our entire business. And I think the reason we’ve performed strongly during this time is that we’ve been very agile in our approach, we’ve worked hard to stay close to our clients, to really listen and understand what they were going through, to consider how we could support them at whichever stage of responding to the pandemic they were going through. As a marketing and BD team, we pivoted entirely at the start of the pandemic and switched our focus to working with our service line experts to look at how we could best support our clients through the pandemic – and we kept evolving this as situations and challenges developed. You could argue it brought out the best in us, everyone pulled together, we collaborated effectively and efficiently, and most importantly we remained focused on what our clients needed.

DR: One thing that we’ve seen a lot of lately is that ‘brand’ is coming to the fore once again (or perhaps merely returning, due to the impact of the pandemic). As director of brand, marketing and business development, why do you think it’s so important to cultivate a great brand at a professional services organisation? Is forging a world-class brand as important as it is for, say, a tech vendor?

LC: I think it’s critical to cultivate a great brand at a professional services firm, yes. In terms of it coming to the fore again – I’m not sure the importance of brand has ever really gone away, but I do think there is perhaps more scrutiny now on brands in terms of what they do, what they say, and even what they perhaps don’t say. There’s a greater expectation for a brand to have integrity, to have a voice and speak out and so I think perhaps these are some of the reasons that brand might feel like more of a central question again.

Being clear and consistent in terms of who you are, what you do, what you stand for and simply put why you’re special is essential. And more than ever this is about the employer brand and a focus on talent as well as of course on clients and prospects, and I’ll touch briefly on both as there’re are obviously some distinctions.

From a client perspective – and this is not new, but it’s only increasing (particularly in our industry) – buyers are more discerning than ever, and the competitive landscape is more diverse. They have more choice, more specialists, and higher expectations. And they will only work with advisors they trust, who can really demonstrate they understand them and what’s important to them. And so for firm’s to really cut through, they need to be crystal clear on what the market wants and be able to clearly articulate why the market should choose you over the competition

We’ve done a lot of work on our brand over the past couple of years globally at Grant Thornton, we’ve really taken the time to talk to our clients and prospects to try and understand both what they want and expect from their providers, what their typical frustrations are with advisors, and what they see us doing really well and in the middle of that is where we’ve anchored our brand. We’ve kept it simple and it’s all about the experience we provide that we know clients want and don’t always get – in short, it’s about how we go beyond. And the pandemic was a great test of words versus action and we saw from our client feedback that we delivered consistently against our brand promise even under the most challenging of circumstance (ie when it really matters) – so we built greater trust in our brand through the pandemic.

And, again, in terms of words versus actions – this is key for professional services firms because we aren’t selling a controllable replicable product, we are selling people, our brand is built on every interaction the market has with us. So ‘what we say’ has to marry up and flow through to the ‘what we do in practice’. And so while brand strategy naturally sits within the remit of the Marketing and BD team, to really make it real and to really leverage the power of brand commercially, it has to flow through the organisation and your people and your culture – from recruitment, how you develop your people, and the experience, exposure and opportunities you give them.

And as I said earlier, I think an audience that brand has never been more important for is talent. Whether that’s graduate recruits or experienced hires. I know for us and I’m sure many others, the market opportunity is there, but it will be our ability to attract and retain the best talent that will be determine the pace and size of our growth. So, going back to my earlier point, people will increasingly look beyond the role to who the organisation is, their culture, what they stand for, what they stand up for. And brand’s wanting to attract the best talent need to be able to clearly, authentically and transparently answer these considerations.

So yes, brand remains critical in the professional services, and the importance of brand will only increase.

DR: And, to be blunt, how have you been looking to improve Grant Thornton’s brand? What specific strategies and tactics are you employing to raise the profile of Grant Thornton?

LC: To give you a couple of simple examples.

We have a complex business with a very wide and diverse range of service offerings. And it can be easy to fall into the trap of being quite internally focused and siloed in how you go to market as a result. But we’ve been working hard to keep our clients at the heart of our thinking. Particularly with the events of the last 12 months, with the pandemic and Brexit, we’ve really focused on trying to offer our clients practical guidance, tools and support to help them ‘Manage today and plan for tomorrow’. We talk to our clients about what’s important to them, and what their challenges are and our Marketing team has been working hard to develop a programme of activity (virtual round tables, national webinars, tailored insights etc) to support front line teams in being able to keep building and developing relationships around what matters to our clients and prospects. There’s nothing ground breaking in this, but I think we’ve been good – particularly since the pandemic – at keeping the client front and centre and so bringing the best of our expertise together in a way that is most valuable to the market.

Another thing I’d point to is our increasing focus on employee advocacy. There’re a couple of things here, and again it’s back to those two key audiences, Clients and Talent. We know that we’re a relationship and people driven business and so our people talking about what we do, offering their perspective, sharing insights and examples with their own networks is hugely powerful. And so we’ve been working hard to help our people do this – helping them understand the channels available to them, helping them to consider what approach authentically works for them, and collating and making it really easy for them to access content that is relevant to their networks. And we’ve had a lot of buy in, appetite and energy from both our Board and leaders within our business around this which is great. We also recognise – and this is a key point in terms of Talent attraction – that we need to authentically show prospective talent what it’s really like at Grant Thornton, we’re really proud of the firm we are, we think have a great culture and offer a dynamic and supportive environment to our people. So we’re now sharing more stories about ‘life inside’ GT than ever before. Breaking down the wall between internal and external messages a little more.

DR: On the other side of the coin, what things do you see B2B marketers doing that are really damaging to a brand, or at the very least not the most effective?

LC: Well, personally what I find most annoying is the pushiness of some B2B marketing tactics. This is predominantly email driven – I get emails that basically say, I’m not sure why you haven’t responded to my last four emails, I’m very busy and want to set up a meeting with you so please could confirm the time you want to speak at. I don’t know if it’s meant to try and trick me into thinking I want to talk to them, but it doesn’t work, it’s just rude and annoying. And a completely different example, I think there is a fine line for Brands and Marketers to tread when demonstrating that you are a brand with a conscience and one that cares about the wider community – this is really important for sure, for the reasons we spoke about earlier, it what many clients and certainly talent expect now. But authenticity is key here and you need to practice what you preach, otherwise it’s just virtue signalling and people will see through that quickly.  

DR: Transformation has been a major theme in the past 12 months, whether that’s the shift to working from home, or organisations launching new products in entirely new markets. Do you expect the transformation agenda to steady this year now that we’re ‘getting back to normal’, or are you preparing for more change to come? If so, how are you preparing?

LC: I was having this conversation with a colleague the other day, it does feel there is constant change, constant transformation, and we were reflecting on how we might help our teams to deal with this. I think the theme of transformation will stay with us for some time. On the point about transitioning to working virtually, we will now face the next transition to a hybrid way of working. And it’s really hard to predict exactly how that will unfold. We know people want to split their time between home and office, but how we make that work is the big question – the tone from the top will determine what happens on the ground. I don’t think the dust will settle for a while – we also need to bear in mind our clients are going to be going through the same and we need to be very flexible to responding to their expectations about how we work with them in the future. Digital transformation – which is something that everyone seems to be wrestling with – is also central to this. The pandemic pushed this agenda further forwards, but i suspect how we work, with each other, with clients, how we provide services, will only continue to evolve. And so in terms of preparation, and going back to the conversation I was having with a colleague the other day, one of the most important things we can do is keep talking to our teams, listening to how people are feeling, sharing information and being transparent as much as possible. And also getting people actively involved in change – so it isn’t always something that is done to people, they have a chance to input, shape, or just talk.

DR: For anyone listening who works in professional services specifically, what’s your biggest and best piece of advice for the rest of this year? Will agility be the name of the game, or might now be the time to start thinking long-term again?

LC: I think It’s a balancing act, it’s a twin track between looking to the longer term and where you want to go and how you can get there, whilst building agility into your culture and mindset. During this last year, we learnt a lot about ourselves and our businesses. In our case at Grant Thornton, we’ve witnessed really high levels of productivity, we’ve driven up margins, we’ve delivered great client service, we’ve improved our culture, we’ve been more connected and inclusive than ever. We’ve moved agendas forward. We’ve made decisions at speed, and then changed them equally quickly when the data changed. And particularly as a marketing and BD team I think we have seen better collaboration. I think the key is to look back at what’s happened and what you’ve gained and don’t want to lose, what you’ve learned that you don’t want to forget, and start to think about what that could look like over longer term, when we are out of the pandemic and at least on that front, there feels to be more certainty. What I mean here is, there are principles and practices that should be captured and can start to inform longer term thinking –leveraging what we’ve learned into the future of our business, or our teams, or at a more granular level, in terms of our campaigns and projects. But I also think that the need to be agile won’t be going away, and so we will need to create a culture that accepts, and embraces change and feels able and empowered to pivot when needed.

If you liked this episode, you can DM Lucy on Twitter @lucyjane2008

Or you can check out Grant Thornton’s case study when they nabbed the award for ‘Marketing team of the year’

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