McMillan Binch
In 1997, no Canadian law firm had significant name recognition among US lawyers, and 150-lawyer McMillan Binch saw an opportunity to be the first Canadian firm to market to the US legal community that was the sources for its northbound referrals.
The firm hired Fishman Marketing to create a dedicated marketing campaign aimed at this U.S. audience. Working closely with their marketing department, we designed an aggressive strategy combining visibility-enhancing activities like advertising and public relations with an ongoing series of in-person meetings with managing partners of prominent U.S. law firms.
The multi-faceted campaign included market research, advertising, public relations, targeted mailings and in-person meetings to its target audience of U.S. prospects and referral sources.
To help build media attention, we created mailings to U.S. media sources designed as a pop-out Rolodex card (remember those…?), with a description of the firm and a contact of list of attorneys in various relevant practice areas.
This integrated campaign began posing the rhetorical question in Canadian red: “Who do you know in Canada?” Then the humorous three-image campaign uses hyper-stereotypic Canadian images commenting “What you know about Canada” and “What you need to know about Canada,” with the answer being, obviously, McMillan Binch.
