Weightmans: See the Possibility
Taking a truly purposeful brand to a national & international audience.
Weightmans invited Aurora to create a strategy to launch their brand purpose with flare.
As a truly ethical, values based business, some beautiful work had already been done at Weightmans to crystallise their purpose. See the Possibility is their view of the world, their philosophy - that ability to see past the obvious, to find opportunities where others see obstacles and to find optimism all around them.
With a short turnaround time and a relatively small budget, Aurora developed a fully integrated and fresh (evergreen) campaign concept that manifested ‘See the Possibility', taking their brand positioning and creative to a different place and introducing the intellectually edgy humour that makes Weightmans who they are.
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Our objective was to embed their purpose with internal staff and stakeholders, then launch the positioning externally with impact. Weightmans needed to shift the needle from very little external marketing to braver and bolder communications, reflecting their uniqueness in a vanilla legal industry - talking more confidently to current and new clients and prospective employees.
Aurora were commissioned to bring their purpose confidently and delightfully to market - creating genuine impact, driving engagement and advocacy amongst staff and, for the first time, delivering an external facing campaign for ’See the Possibility’, one which represented their lived purpose and created cut-through in an often dry and predictable legal industry.
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Our strategy was to amplify Weightmans genuine purpose from within - launching the campaign first to their people and harnessing them as advocates. We created quirky creative with the potential to keep on building over the year, adapted into each area of the firm from Claims through to HR. Creative that was very different to anything else in the sector, and pressed on the intellectually edgy nature of the legal profession. Lawyers often feel seen as dry and boring, but this campaign enabled them - and Weightmans - to bring out their true charming personality and to continue to do this, increasing their own personal brands alongside that of the firm. In fact one of their lawyers has become a Linked In influencer.
We wanted all of Weightmans people to feel ownership of their purpose and of the campaign. We harnessed their love of the written word and intellectual humour to galvanise them to post responses to the campaign to their own social channels. We embedded See the Possibility through an external launch and a range of activities and creative which delighted staff. From this, we created a big launch moment and revved up staff to post to the #SeeThePossibility hashtag.
With a focus on their prime B2B channel, LinkedIn, we made a huge organic push for the campaign supported by targeted paid activity.
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We refined the messaging and tone of voice bringing See the Possibility to life across all touchpoints from brand ambassador tool-kits to social media.
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Our creative strategy explored how to harness See the Possibility in a warm, playful way so we conceived the underpinning creative idea….
Some work had been done around this during the development of the proposition, however we didn’t feel this really captured the scale of See the Possibility - so we went much bigger with our messaging. Where some saw eggs, Weightmans saw a new life. Where others saw bricks, Weightmans saw a hospital.
Where others see life literally, Weightmans always sees the lateral. We wanted to deploy an unused creative technique for the sector - illustration; brought to life visually through stylised hero animations.
Alongside this our narrative was quirky and intellectually edgy; the legal sector enjoy wordplay so we harnessed this humour as a tool to help drive our engage with Weightman people and beyond.
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We created a campaign which ran through Weightmans financial year, evolving to communicate with their various audiences - building out a wealth of See the Possibility content which spanned their communications channels.
It is important to note that this was the first time Weightmans had done an externally facing brand campaign and their first foray into paid media, so the budgets were tiny in comparison to many - however the response achieved by the paid test were astonishing, and the organic engagement was exceptional for either a B2B or B2C campaign.
A year of activations
We created a campaign which ran through Weightman’s financial year, evolving to communicate with their various audiences - building out a wealth of See the Possibility content which spanned their communications channels.
This included a vast amout of work to embed the ethos of the campaign - that spanned every department and level of Weightman’s business, from the board to early careers.
Ready to launch
It made complete sense to start lighting the fires within Weightmans own army of advocates. Ensuring buy-in throughout development, we delivered a launch briefing for the entire organisation - 9 offices, over 1200 people, as well as a social media training session for the full workforce. Using the power of people and culture to turbo charge the campaign.
And they called it lawyer love…
It went off like a firework. Every department joined in delighting in the joy of words to imagine what they could see in those objects. Which of course became increasingly obtuse and esoteric.
A full 360 brand
The launch was just the start - this campaign has evolved into an integrated evergreen B2B brand with a house style.
We wanted all of Weightmans people to feel ownership of their purpose and of the campaign.
We harnessed their love of the written word and intellectual humour to galvanise them to post responses to the campaign to their own social channels. We embedded See the Possibility through an external launch and a range of activities and creative which delighted staff. From this, we created a big launch moment and revved up staff to post to the #SeeThePossibility hashtag.
Incredible, award winning results
This was the first time ever that Weightmans have done an internal brand campaign. We delivered it at stealth speed (just a 6 week turnaround from strategy to full activation, with detailed team engagement for launch) at a hugely efficient budget for its breadth, scale and reach.
Our Aurora owned organic approach, empowering Weightmans people to advocate and amplify was integral to the campaign achieving such incredible results - and blasting it’s KPIs our of the water.
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With a CPM of £9.40, the campaign operated at £4.87 less than the average CPM for the target audience. This efficiency resulted in an effective budget usage of £4,084.18 compared to the projected £6,197.18, indicating significant cost savings.
The strategic deployment of budget towards content that elicited high engagement rates, such as the brick and egg animations, maximised ROI.
The campaign notably outperformed all UK LinkedIn ad benchmarks:
- The view rate of 38.16% surpassed the high benchmark of 35%.
- The video completion rate of 3.61% exceeded the high benchmark of 2%.
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The effectiveness of the campaign was a key lever attributed to the growth of the business - fuelling 12.6% revenue growth. Aligned to their wonderful culture, Weightmans staff were rewarded for the part they played with a significant part of this growth was directed into the Staff/FSP Bonus pot as staff shared in the success of brand building efforts.
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The comprehensive engagement strategy, combined with targeted content delivery, ensured that Weightmans not only reached its audience but also engaged them deeply, laying a strong foundation for future campaigns and solidifying its brand presence in the market. In a recent report looking at which top 200 UK law firms' posts performed best on average (April 2024), Weightmans achieved fifth position, alongside several top 20 firms.
