Jess Saumarez Of Stephenson Law: Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Your people are your brand ambassadors. Whether a customer is talking with a head of sales, someone in customer service or, like us, a lawyer as part of a service, each and every person needs to reflect the brand you are creating. To build a genuine brand, the humans within the business need to represent it.

As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Jess Saumarez, Head of Marketing at Stephenson Law.

Jess Saumarez is an entrepreneurial digital marketing expert with a colourful career, having previously co-founded two businesses: LUX Rewards and Hedira. As Head of Marketing for Stephenson Law, Jess is a branding expert, and has honed in on a particular ability to connect consumers with brands that are trusted, authentic, and ultimately: human.

Her most recent work has been within the world of law, a notoriously stuffy and archaic industry in much need of an overhaul. Her work within this field has resulted in a litany of awards for the business, including a cult following rarely seen within the industry. From individuals clambering for branded hoodies, to public declarations of fandom, the business has thrived under Jess’s ability to bring the four walls of a business to life.

In her time Jess has broken down the barriers between consumers and law and has managed the impossible: showcasing corporate lawyers as human, trustworthy, and reliable. In doing so, the business has become a multi-million pound company within just four years in addition to acting as the legal partner to countless household names. When asked her secret, Jess’s response is the same every time: build the brand and the rest will follow.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve never been a cog in a machine. Whenever I had the opportunity to break outside of a mold and build a new idea from the ground up, I would grab it with both hands.

This is perhaps why after leaving university I dove head-first into the startup world and joined the team at LUX Rewards. We were a team of two based in Bristol, offering diners reward points for their spend. Although I would touch most areas of the business, it was the creative marketing that really interested me. How could I build an addictive brand for customers, a trustworthy brand for the partnered restaurants, and a seemingly “large” brand for companies like PwC who wanted to offer rewards to their staff?

After scaling LUX Rewards I set out building a consumer app that was closer to my heart: Hedira. I wanted to help people care for their houseplants, whilst helping plant retailers reconnect with their customers. It was a different yet similar challenge: Hedira had two main target markets, and the brand had to appeal to both B2B and B2C customers.

This startup experience gave me a solid foundation to work with brands who want to appeal to various audiences and scale their audience visibility. It was a natural fit for me to dive headfirst into the world of marketing, working with creative and ambitious founders and CEOs. Cue working with Stephenson Law — a forward-thinking entrepreneurial legal services provider.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Back before we had a CRM in place, I would reach out to partners and individuals to invite them to events or rope them into being in our marketing communications. I thought it would be a great idea to tell people that I had “hand-picked” them to be part of a marketing video, and that the video would be exclusive to them… I then forgot to put people into BCC and sent the email out to close to 100 individuals on my hit list — they could all see each other’s emails (that sinking feeling was not ok). No one answered, and my email address was put on the spam hitlist.

It did teach me several things:

1. I will have better conversations with people and a return on my efforts if I stick to personalized communications. Had I taken 10 people on that list, and really taken the time to communicate with them on their level, then I could have made better relationships with them.
2. Always check your CC and BCC…
3. Invest in a CRM to properly segment your marketing audiences.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Considering the legal industry is full of very dull corporate brands, Stephenson Law stands out quite a lot. We avoid using legal jargon, talk about topics that most competitors would run a mile away from (such as National Orgasm Day) and invest heavily in our approach to talking to clients in a human way.

We have gained quite a reputation for working with emerging tech companies (it’s our bread and butter!) and so it seemed only right that whilst our clients were building NFTs, we should explore and innovate in that area too. We wanted to explore whether there was an appetite to buy utility tokens that offered the owner legal time with our experts, and demonstrate how forward thinking we were.

For the grand majority of our audiences, our project was commended, but we quickly saw negative comments online from legal professionals saying we were “attention seekers” and “hipster flip flop wearers.” Needless to say, we ruffled some feathers.

As a brand we’re ok with that. We’re ok that some people don’t understand what we do or criticize our approach to innovating within our industry. People are scared of change, they don’t like things they don’t understand, and that’s what many of our clients experience too. We stand out because we mirror our clients in our entrepreneurial approach, and aren’t afraid of disrupting something that needs to change.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’m currently working on the rebrand and relaunch of our website. We want it to look like anything but a law firm’s website, and give visitors the information they need in order to make a decision to work with us.

It will help people because we’re not focusing our content on how great we are and what we can do: We are focusing on the problems our clients are experiencing. By helping our visitors navigate legal complexities in their business, we are building up trust, a community, and a positive brand image and can focus our marketing efforts.

Ok let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

Brand marketing, in a nutshell, is getting people to like you. It builds up your brand equity (a key selling factor for any company looking to exit), makes an audience trust you and therefore shortens the buying decision making process. It is also proven to increase the average spend of a customer, and allows businesses to launch new products and services quicker. It’s the glue that makes customers stay loyal to your company, and forgive you for any mistakes that you may make. It’s worth mentioning here that it also helps improve the employer brand of a company. Brand marketing is the long-term strategy of any business and needs to be built into any marketing activity a team does.

Product marketing is then a direct marketing or sales activity. It’s making audiences aware of the products and services your company offers, and the main aim will be to get audiences to perform an action. This activity needs to be hyper-targeted, in my experience, to be successful. Any product marketing campaign needs to have an integrated approach, always with an eye on the funnel and every action a customer needs to make in order to make a purchase: From seeing and clicking on a social post, all the way down to committing to a purchase.

Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

A brand is the personality and voice of any company. By investing into building a brand, you’re investing into an audience recognizing and associating a certain feeling towards you. That’s why it is so important to create brand guidelines that your teams (not just the marketing team) need to read and be familiar with, as a brand will serve as a basis of your company culture.

There are many tools out there that have made it easy to create marketing materials, for example Canva offering incredible looking templates with various colours and fonts, but I would implore any marketer not to fall into the trap of using “what looks best” for one particular campaign. Consistency is key when it comes to brand marketing: Your colours, fonts, spelling, language and illustrations or photography style all contribute towards your brand, and if you want to build on it, you need to commit to a set guideline in your communications.

Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.

1) Create a brand book with clearly defined brand guidelines and stick to them. Consistency, again, is key.

2) Your brand isn’t solely expressed in your visual assets: Your brand is also your company voice! Social media has given companies the ability to personify their brand and interact online like a person would.

3) Make sure that your brand is felt at every touchpoint during a customer journey. It’s no use investing in a brand that stops as soon as marketing hands over to sales: It needs to be experienced when your customers are using your product or service, and even post-sale.

4) If you are a “bold” and “exciting” company, should you really be using soft pastels in your brand palette? If you are positioning your company as a thought-leader and educator, is your website optimized to allow visitors to find resources? Whichever pillar you decide to build your brand on, make sure that it is reflected heavily in whatever platform or content type you’re using.

5) Your people are your brand ambassadors. Whether a customer is talking with a head of sales, someone in customer service or, like us, a lawyer as part of a service, each and every person needs to reflect the brand you are creating. To build a genuine brand, the humans within the business need to represent it.

In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job building a believable and beloved brand. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?

I’m currently enjoying the branding of dating app Thursday (previously HoneyPot). From the get-go they wanted to position themselves as a down-to-earth, cheeky brand that is fed up with dating apps and being single. They show themselves as the dating app alternative for those that are too busy with “dating admin”, which is why their messaging is short and concise, their staff shout out about their dating lives, they use GIFs wherever possible and their advertising campaigns are bold and different.

What impresses me is that back when they were Honeypot they stopped and really listened to their users and analyzed their behavioral data. They noticed some key trends and decided to hone in on them for the purpose of their brand and to set themselves apart. Insights such as:

• Getting a date is traditionally hard and full of admin.
• People want to meet face to face as soon as possible.
• Thursday was the most popular day in London to go for a date.

Moral of the story? Analyse how your customers are behaving both with your product/service and outside of your company. It could provide you with some great branding tips and even a potential pivot!

In advertising, one generally measures success by the number of sales. How does one measure the success of a brand building campaign? Is it similar, is it different?

There are several metrics marketing teams can use to measure the success of a brand building campaign:

1) Awareness: Often coined a vanity metric when it comes to product advertising, however as far as a brand building campaign is concerned, awareness allows a team to see how many eyes are seeing your campaign and becoming aware of your company.

2) Brand sentiment: This is sometimes hard to monitor because it is not always a quantitative metric. Brand sentiment analysis allows you to see how people feel about your brand and is often categorized into three segments: Positive, neutral and negative.

3) Mentions: Are people talking about you online? Referring your brand to their connections? Using you as a case study? This will tell you how the public sees your brand.

4) Net promoter score: This is more for your current customers or clients. It will show you how willing your customers are to refer you to someone else, therefore providing your marketing team with a list of brand advocators (and areas of detractors that need to be improved on).

What role does social media play in your branding efforts?

Social media gives a business the opportunity to personify their brand — emphasis on the “social” in social media! The platforms can allow teams to bring their brand to life and chat with their audiences as though they were a person. This has become apparent on Twitter, where a report indicated that 64% of Twitter customers would rather message a social channel for customer support rather than call a business.

In addition, social media allows a brand to be visible in communities it would otherwise not be present: By removing geographical barriers, social media allows brands to seek areas of opportunity in niche communities and gain a reputation in that space.

What advice would you give to other marketers or business leaders to thrive and avoid burnout?

Surround yourself with good people. I’m extremely fortunate that at Stephenson Law we have fostered a culture of clear communication and understanding. When a team is built on trust, you have the power to change and influence your workload because people will recognise that you are doing it for a good reason.

I would also say that you need to allow yourself the time and space to be constantly learning. Marketing is changing all the time, and so are most industries. In order to thrive as a marketer, you need to be on the pulse of any new changes within your space, and be open to adopt new technologies. It’s way harder for a marketing leader to start from scratch once a new technology has been adopted by the competition for over a year.

Finally, to avoid burnout I know I need to give myself the space to be creative, which is something I have seen time and time again amongst marketing professionals. Marketing can constitute a lot of analysis, campaign building and technical builds, and generally content creation gets left to the rest of the team as you become a leader in your space. Although this is a natural progression for most marketing leaders, I have had so many conversations with individuals who would be willing to take a pay cut just to rekindle with the “hands on creative” side of marketing. My answer to this would be to make sure that, every now and then when the inspiration comes to you, work with your content creation team on a project that allows you to use your creativity. Another answer would be to make sure that your creativity is expressed through activities outside of the workplace.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’m a big believer that education systems should rethink how students are allowed to learn. When I was 15, I was told by my teachers that I would achieve Ds at my GCSEs and therefore promptly asked to leave the school so that I wouldn’t bring down the school average (I went on to get straight As) and when I was at university I saw students who received the very best grades but who were unable to excel in the “real world” of management. We need a real shift in how we determine who’s “intelligent” or not and value individuals who think outside of the box and creatively. Being different in our current curriculum is seen as a negative, which can have a lasting negative impact on children as they grow up.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Life is the best teacher — so go live it!

My university degree was all about working for big multinational companies — therefore it didn’t come as a surprise that many of the people secured graduate schemes before they’d even finished the course. I quickly decided that I needed to find out more about the working world before committing to a career for three years so I worked in a startup whilst saving to go off traveling. I had absolutely no regrets that by the time I got back from my travels (whilst my peers were 2 years into a career) I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to become and what “good” looked like for me in a job. I never would have been where I am today without taking my time and living a varied life.

We are blessed that very prominent leaders in business and entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Sheryl Sandberg — she’s so inspirational and I absolutely loved her book!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’d like to keep up with what we’re doing at Stephenson Law you can also find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.