What Binet and Field Can Teach Your Law Firm and Why You Won’t Listen

Let me start with a prediction: Most law firms reading this will nod along, perhaps even share it with colleagues, and then promptly ignore everything I’m about to tell them.

Not because the evidence isn’t compelling – it is. Not because the strategy isn’t proven – it absolutely is. But because most law firms are so caught up in short-term activation tactics and quarterly billing targets that they’ll never implement the fundamental changes needed for long-term brand building.

But I’ll tell you anyway, because that’s what I do.

Who the Heck is Les Binet & Peter Field?

Les Binet and Peter Field spent years analysing the IPA databank – thousands of case studies of marketing effectiveness spanning multiple decades. Their seminal work “The Long and the Short of It” revealed fundamental truths about how marketing actually works. And while they weren’t specifically studying law firms, the principles apply perfectly to legal services marketing.

Here’s the core of what they discovered: Marketing works in two distinct ways. You have short-term sales activation, which drives immediate response and quick wins. And you have long-term brand building, which creates mental availability and future preference. Both are essential. Both work together. But they work very differently.

Sales activation is what most law firms exclusively focus on today. It’s your Google Ads targeting “divorce lawyer near me.” It’s your LinkedIn posts about recent wins. It’s your email nurture sequence promoting your latest webinar on tax law changes. This stuff works – it drives leads and inquiries. But it’s also temporary, requiring constant feeding like a demanding pet that’s never quite satisfied.

Brand building is different. It’s emotional. It’s broad-reaching. It’s about creating distinctive memory structures that make your firm come to mind easily when legal services are needed. It works more slowly, but the effects accumulate and endure. It’s the foundation that makes all your activation work better.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Binet and Field’s research shows that the optimal balance between brand and activation is around 60:40 in favour of brand building. For law firms like yours, it should probably be even higher – closer to 70:30. But, at least 50:50. Why, because after doing this work for close to 2 decades, I can never get a partnership group to agree to more.

Now, quick survey: How many law firms do you know that spend 70% of their marketing budget and effort on genuine brand building? I’ll wait.

The reality is most firms spend 90%+ on pure activation. They’re caught in a cycle of chasing immediate results, measuring everything in two-week increments, and wondering why their marketing feels like pushing a boulder uphill. They caught up by shonky freelancers and agencies offering all types of wild deals, than blow their cash and come to us wanting an intervention.

The Irrationale, Rationale.

The idea that decisions by legal consumers are purely rational is nonsense. As Ehrenberg-Bass showed, business decisions are made by humans who are just as susceptible to emotional and subconscious factors as any consumer. In fact, given the high stakes and career risk involved in choosing legal counsel, these emotional factors become more important, not less.

Second, brand building isn’t about fuzzy feelings – it’s about creating mental availability. When a potential client has a legal need, what firms instantly come to mind? That’s not rational consideration – that’s System 1 thinking, as Kahneman would say. And it’s heavily influenced by brand building.

System 1 Thinking: The brain’s fast, automatic, unconscious, and emotional responses to situations and stimuli. Examples include effortlessly reading a billboard, tying your shoelaces without thinking, or instinctively stepping over a puddle.

System 2 Thinking: A slow, effortful, and logical mode of thought used when tackling more complex problems. This includes searching for a friend in a crowd, carefully parking in a tight space, or evaluating the cost-effectiveness of your lunch.

Third, the data is unequivocal. Binet and Field’s analysis shows that campaigns with strong brand building components are consistently more effective at driving business results – including in professional services.

Here is Your 3 Step Plan

So what should law firms actually do with this information? Here’s your three-step plan:

1. Accept that you need both brand building and activation – and rebalance your budget accordingly. Yes, this means taking money away from some of your precious tactical campaigns. Deal with it.
2. Understand that brand building is different from activation. It needs broad reach. It needs emotional connection. It needs distinctive assets that can be used consistently over time. And it needs patience – you won’t see the results in next week’s dashboard.
3. Build a proper brand strategy. Not a tagline. Not a logo refresh. A genuine strategy that defines what you stand for, who you’re targeting, and how you’ll be meaningfully different from competitors.

Let me give you a real example. One of the few law firms that actually gets this is Slater and Gordon in Australia. They invested heavily in brand building through TV and broad-reach media, focusing on emotional storytelling about fighting for everyday people. They maintained this consistently for years while their competitors chased tactical opportunities. The result? They built enormous mental availability and preference that made all their activation work more effective.

But here’s why most firms won’t follow their example: Brand building requires three things that law firms absolutely hate:

1. Patience – Results take 6-12 months minimum to show up in any meaningful way.
2. Consistency – You need to stick with it for years, not months.
3. Inefficiency – By definition, broad reach means you’re “wasting” some of your exposure on people who don’t need legal services right now.

The typical law firm marketing director, facing pressure for immediate results and quarterly performance reviews, simply can’t make this case effectively. And the typical law firm partner, trained to focus on billable hours and immediate client needs, won’t have the patience to see it through.

So they’ll stick with their activation-heavy approach, wondering why their marketing never seems to build momentum while watching other firms slowly but surely build unassailable market positions.

Here’s the ultimate irony: Law firms constantly advise their clients to think long-term, to make strategic rather than tactical decisions, to invest in foundations that will pay off over time. Yet when it comes to their own marketing, they do exactly the opposite.

The question isn’t whether this approach works – it’s whether your firm has the strategic clarity and organisational courage to actually implement it.

I’m not holding my breath.