A law firm rebranded as "Integrated Counsel" and charged more because the unfamiliar term sounded credible and made clients curious. The strategy works across industries: invent a distinctive professional title that captures what you actually do, avoid generic labels, and you can justify premium pricing.
I was working with this law firm, and I already know what popped in your mind. You heard law firm, I'm sure in your mind pops a guy with a briefcase suing somebody and a big, big bill after the fact. A lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer after all, right? And if you need legal services, yeah, you want a good lawyer, but they better be price competitive. So this law firm approached us and said, how do we break out of this paradigm or belief that people have lawyers are all the same? And we changed their name. No longer did we call them lawyers, we called them integrated counsel. And I suspect you've heard the term integrated counsel and you're like, what does that mean? Exactly, exactly. We used a term that no one heard before and what happens is when something different presents itself, the customer gives it immediate attention to evaluate is that an opportunity or a threat. They will listen to you. And what that law firm did, they said, well integrated counsel means We do legal work just like any other lawyer can. That's the easy part. We also come on site, we integrate our team into your culture, we get a sense of how your business runs, and when we prepare your legal documents, which is easy, we can now speak the language of how your business runs. We can speak to the culture of your business. And customers started to pay a premium. You see how simple it was? They said, Yeah, of course lawyers are lawyers are lawyers. That's the easy part. But we're integrated counsel. We're different. If you call yourself a pharmacist, you run a pharmacy, you are falling victim to a generic label. Come up with a new professional term. Now, I'm not familiar with terms in the pharmacy arena, but maybe a master pharmacist, maybe a meditologist or something. But that's horrible. Do not use that one. But could you— we'll just play with that one. Say meditologist or medicineologist. That's even worse. So we'll say you're a mecenologist. You can go up to your customers and say, yes, we have an on-staff mecenologist who is going to sit down with you and give you some details. And they'll say, what is that? And I'll say, you never heard of that before? Oh, we are in fact the only one in the state that has a mecenologist. Let me make an introduction. Now be careful of the law. Of course you don't want to break the law, but come up with a label that distinguishes you. Because in the customer's mind, the second they hear familiar terms, I don't care, you can speak until you're blue in the face, they will ignore you. Just like if I went on and on how great my circus is, you already know what a circus is. Come up with a unique term. That's better than messianologist, but come up with a unique distinguishing term to distinguish your store or the people in your staff, and you will stand out and you'll get the attention of your customer. Now here's the key. Don't do some cheesy marketing term. It has to be a professional-sounding term.
