Michael Phelps is not only the most successful swimmer of all time, he’s also the most successful Olympian of all time, with 28 medals in all. Phelps also has a useful tendency to drop in the occasional swimming metaphor that can be applied to any context you wish, such as professional services brand strategy and thought leadership. 

Staying in your lane

People always want to know the secret with the likes of Phelps. Other than the once-in-a-generation talent and the incredible self-sacrifice and hard work, what’s the secret? One such secret ingredient that Phelps has consistently referred to is a single-minded focus and a refusal to be distracted by what others are doing.

“I am staying in my lane… I can’t control what other people do, so for me, I was always worried about myself and worried about what I needed to do.”

Michael Phelps

In a similar way to Phelps, the best brands are completely single-minded. They know what they stand for, and they focus on activating that core promise. They stay in their lane.

In a professional services context, as big themes and hot topics emerge in the market, there is typically a mad rush to publish IP and POVs into that space. In innovation strategy terms, this is market claiming behaviour—trying to establish a dominant early position while the market works out what is going on. Think digital transformation, cybersecurity, ESG, or most recently, generative AI. Each of these spaces can become more akin to an aggressive water polo match with flying elbows, rather than the orderly swim lanes at your local leisure centre.

Within this reality, the Michael Phelps rule applies. Stick to your lane. There are a few firms that have been particularly effective at bringing through a single-minded brand strategy into their content strategy. Yes, there is a need to engage in the water polo match to some degree, but firms can also create their own swim lane, away from the masses, that is anchored in what the firm stands for. Let’s quickly look at three examples.

Accenture’s brand strategy is focused on Leading through change, you may have seen the ads. When we look at its content strategy, you can see from the insights section, there is a featured series of thought leadership called Voices of Change. Much of their highest quality and most progressive thinking exists here and it sits in a separate swim lane to the thought leadership on more general hot topics such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, etc. You can see in the image below how these things are separated out in the ‘Insights’ navigation.

PA Consulting’s brand is anchored in Bringing ingenuity to life and when we shift into content and thought leadership, we can see that thematic content is framed within Possibility, which is a rather elegant way of carving out a distinctive swim lane.

Finally, if we hop over to the legal sector, Mischon de Reya offers a powerful example of creating an ownable swim lane. Its brand is focused on shaping the world’s possibilities during times of profound change. While this is a brand territory that many professional services firms have drifted towards, Mischon’s brand promise is supported by a standout content strategy, based around the Law of Tomorrow. It is very single-minded and is executed in a way that is refreshingly different from your typical law firm.

Swim lanes and planning

Brand strategy aside, the concept of swim lanes in business is mostly associated with business process design and flowcharts in tools such as Visio. Swim lanes help to create a visual structure and logic that supports ideation and problem solving (google a few examples to see how this looks in practice) and in this way, it can also be helpful in thinking about marketing, brand, and content strategy.

In most firms, there is a constant tension between the demands of different parts of the organisation to receive marketing support and to get their thinking, IP, and propositions out to market. Consider the brand team, industry and sector teams, service line teams, market segments, channels and intermediaries, global regions and country offices, key account teams, technical teams, and finally individual partners and aspirational directors—all may want a voice in the market at different points of the year. It can be hard to see the wood for the trees, and marketing leadership needs to try and bring order to this to avoid being pulled down into the matrix vortex.

A swim lane-based approach can help you to connect your brand, marketing, and thought leadership plans in a more coherent and logical way. A visual format is also compatible with a more collaborative style of development within teams. What do we need to do in the brand strategy lane? What could be the focus in the industry lane? Is there a specific service proposition angle that needs to come through in that lane? What could be a regional take on this? What is the right balance across the full portfolio?

Developing a swim lane structure and mapping this to a time dimension (e.g., H1, H2 or Q 1, 2, 3, 4) can help to provide a big picture view, bring a sense of order, and calm the waters.