Last week I learned about microbrands. I share below highlights of Why You’re Buying Products From Companies You’ve Never Heard Of (Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2018) , an article describing them. I then ruminate on what the legal market can learn from this.

Microbrands article summary:

  • An “explosion of different ‘microbrands’ for gadgets, apparel, cosmetics, furniture and food are now targeting us with uncanny precision.” Some like Casper Mattresses have become very successful.
  • Several ingredients support the rise of microbrands:
    • Marketers can quickly test brand ideas with mock-ups in ads, even before product exists.
    • If tests are positive, produce the product quickly. Overseas factories today can churn out orders in smaller, more customized lots than they could a few years ago
    • Many moving parts – payments, inventory management, and shipping – can now be easily outsourced.
  • The article outlines a typical approach to a microbrand product launch:
    • Think of an idea.
    • Develop ad copy.
    • Spend some bucks promoting on social media, targeting carefully, based on good data analytics.
    • Measure engagement with the ad.
    • If engagement is high enough, seek pre-orders and commission a factory to produce the product.
    • If it sells, keep going.
  • Conclusions
    • Traditional brands have been forced to reproduce elements of microbrands. Examples include  subscriptions and free delivery.
    • “The future of brands is just like everything else on the internet, where big things get bigger than ever, while a long tail of other options finds their own niche markets. “

I see several potential lessons for large law firms and other legal providers:

  • Established players cannot ignore upstarts.
    • Upstarts change market expectations, even if they don’t take share
      • Personal example: Until recently, I was a shaving relic, sticking with Gillette Trac 2 from the 1970s. Then I saw ads for Harrys, initially a microbrand. It offered a $3 trial, a cool looking handle, and five blade razors at a reasonable price. Now I subscribe. Goodbye Gillette.
    • We see the impact of upstarts in the legal market.
      • Law companies and alternative legal service providers (ALSP) have introduced new ways of handling legal work.
      • This is good news all around.
      • As I noted last month in my post Why Alternative Legal Provider Market Share May be Limited, law firms already have adopted some of these tricks.
      • We should expect legal tech company, boutique law firms, and new law companies to continue introducing new approaches. Some will develop devoted niche followings, some will fail, and some will be imitated widely by big law.
    • Query for the growing number of Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Innovation Officers in Big Law:
      • Do you pay attention to new players, which are the closest legal has to microbrands?
      • Do you consciously consider the lessons they have to offer? Which are worth imitating?
  • Adopt the concepts behind data-driven testing and careful differentiation.
    • Microbrands don’t try to sell everyone.
      • They start with a hypotheses about a small segment that would find the product appealing. Sometimes that expand to a bigger segment.
    • Could law firms use a similar approach to decide what niche sub-practices to pursue?
      • Large law firms and law companies will likely never have a high enough volume of clients to do totally data-driven analysis.
      • But I think profit lies in better segmenting clients and prospects and then engaging segments with ideas.
      • Microbrands are designed to fail fast and at low cost. Can the same idea apply to developing new practices?
        • Privacy is now a huge practice. It was not 20 years ago. Some adventurous lawyers and firms had to take a chance on pursuing it.
        • Payments and blockchain are arguably in the same position today.
        • What’s next and how will your firm figure it out?
    • Does this idea also apply to targeting individual clients within larger law departments?
      • Are large law departments monoliths or more like the consumer market?
      • If the former, a unitary sales approach likely works best.
      • If the latter, then treat the law department as a microcosm of consumer markets. That means develop different pitches / offerings for different customers within the department.
  • Carefully consider your means of production and distribution, especially unbundling.
    • Microbrands illustrate that unbundling succeeds for both production and distribution.
      • We see some of this in legal, with more mature clients allocating work to both law firms and law companies, depending on the risk and nature of the matter.
      • More law firms offer digital legal services. This seems a similar trend, one likely to continue.
      • Some firms, especially in the UK, now offer law factory services via their low cost centers aways from London
    • Knowledge management
      • In legal, one ingredient of unbundling is knowledge artifacts
      • As law firms – and even large law departments – work to improve service delivery, do they need a more systematic strategy to create and manage knowledge artifacts, which include both re-usable content and process maps.
      • If this analogy holds, do both firms and departments need to re-think compensation to enable a move to a more flexible system of production?

Even if my ideas above are only partly baked, even if some fail, there is a bigger point here as well. Lawyers must learn from other markets. I frequently wonder if we do enough of that.