CMS Brand 2021.
Starting tomorrow’s solutions today.
Challenge
Having worked with CMS in 2013 on its then brand strategy, the firm asked us to help to express a new 2025 strategy, ’Future Facing’. In a world of ever-accelerating change, where technology is increasingly important, ‘Future Facing’ is about CMS using its business-focused advice to help clients of every size face the future with confidence.
Action
With 80 offices in more than 40 countries and 5,000+ lawyers worldwide, CMS needs a strong internationally recognisable brand. In charge of that is a central brand team, based in Frankfurt. In leading this project, the team also had to win the support of all CMS firms.
We helped to set up a steerco with representatives from the largest firms. We ran a series of workshops to understand how the different parts of CMS saw the future for their clients. Then, with the core strategy, we took these inputs and developed a set of shared future-facing messages that could be used by the entire firm.
“The new visual appearance of the brand has proven to be more flexible, modern and tangible, both internally and externally.”
Donata Kohlase, Senior Brand Manager, CMS
Impact
CMS’s identity has changed several times since the firm was created in 1999, most recently in 2013 when the “Your World First” claim was introduced. There was now an opportunity to refine elements and make the brand more suitable for digital use. We modernised the firm’s logo and adjusted its well-known supporting line, ‘law.tax’ to say ‘law.tax.future’ – visually signalling that CMS is firmly in the business of the future.
We developed an implementation toolkit and ran training sessions to cascade the new direction throughout the firm, from managing partners to business development professionals, marketing and internal creative teams.
We developed an internal launch campaign for CMS’s Global Partners Summit, and we have recently been asked to help CMS’s internal team filter out and share some of the best work being done by the firm since the adoption of this new brand expression.
“As this re-brand was carried out in a global pandemic, Gather has shown their outstanding ability to adapt to our changing circumstances and carry out this project on time, on budget and with the best possible outcome. From the beginning, Gather had an excellent understanding of our business but also our underlying strategy. We couldn’t have asked for a more trusted partner and a better result.”
Jochen Lindmayer, Head of Marketing and Brand, CMS
Services & contact
- Key messages
- Identity refresh
- Videos and toolkits
- Training and consultancy