Authentic Identity helps professional services firms build strong, differentiated brands with which to attract and keep the right clients and the right talent. Our name reflects our two core beliefs: that who you are determines how you create value; and that in a professional services firm your brand is a mandate, not a mask.

Brand Strategy

Every professional services firm has a unique DNA that creates distinctive value for its clients, binds the firm’s best people together and sets the firm apart from its competitors. We help you uncover your unique identity and use it to drive growth, profitability and impact. And we help your professionals understand how the heritage they share and care about informs and grounds the firm’s future – so they are more likely to help you get there.

Brand Alignment

Professional services firms face a unique challenge: how do you honor the autonomy and independence that your professionals cherish (qualities that enable them to create value for your clients) while delivering a client experience sufficiently consistent to constitute a brand? How do you align the motivations of your professionals with the behaviors rewarded by your business processes, and with the value that your brand promises?

Brand Communication

Many professional services firms present themselves in terms of the services they offer (their practice areas). But there is a lot more power and strategic wiggle-room in owning a set of issues than in owning a set of point-solutions. The key is to use your brand to focus and drive your intellectual capital development, your people's behavior, and your marketing communications strategy. Then you can tell a bigger, more compelling story.

Featured

When in Doubt …?

Doubt can undermine our ability to commit to a course of action. How do we manage through that in the time of COVID-19? Join us as we explore in this, the third of our short series of posts, distilling leadership lessons from classic stories of the journey home.

The Deadly Allure of the Familiar

We are all desperately trying steer our organizations safely home, through the storms and whirlpools of this deadly pandemic. But is normality the right destination anymore?

Going Home Without Going Back

How do we find home when we have been away for so long? Organizations everywhere are longing for the comfort of business-as-usual and the reassurance of old routines. But home is not what or where we think it is

Another Blow to America's Brand

”Brand America" is taking a beating on several fronts lately. The US response to the tragic Ethiopian Airlines disaster has delivered the latest blow. The brand story that America tells itself and the world is a story of leadership, fairness, integrity, optimism, innovation and trust. Those values are core to the idea of America. We need to live our brand.

Brand the Relationship, Not Just the Offering

A profound and sustainable source of differentiation for most professional services firms is the relationship they develop with the client. The relationship provides the experiential and emotional “wrapper” in which the service is delivered.

What’s the Point of Business?

We need to re-think the “why” of business so we can develop a better “how”, one that meets our real human needs

Why Business Needs to Watch Its Language

Business leaders commonly declare that they need their people to “bring all of themselves to work”. Why then does the language of business seem designed to drain all humanity from the enterprise?

Values: The Great Missed Opportunity

An organization’s core values are the source of its uniqueness. They are the inviolable truths that shape your authentic identity and guide the behavior that makes you who you are. So why are most corporate values so hopelessly trite?

Vision: It's Not Always About You

Why are so many corporate vision statements anything but visionary? Maybe it’s because so many of them are self-regarding. They describe a business ambition, not a vision.

Seven Tips for Maintaining Momentum

Maintaining momentum is crucial to the success of the brand effort. The longer it takes, the more likely the initiative is to run into the sands. Here are some useful tips we have learned from our clients about keeping up the pace

Time to Commit to Your Organization’s Uniqueness

Your organization carries the seeds of uniqueness within it. It has the potential to create value and attract talent in a way that no other firm can. Here’s how to realize that potential

Are You Underestimating the Value You Deliver?

Many professional services firms define their value too narrowly. As a result, they are missing out on opportunities to differentiate themselves.