I received an e-mail today from Jerrold Parker, senior partner at Parker Waichman Allonso, LLP, the well-known New York personal injury law firm more well known for asbestos litigation. Jerry was writing to ask me to evaluate and list his new personal injury case management software called SmartAdvocate. Apparently, Jerry invested a substantial amount of money to develop custom case management software for personal injury and mass tort cases and is now licensing it to other personal injury lawyers.

I responded to Jerry’s e-mail and he called me back a few minutes later. During our telephone conversation, we began discussing my vanity phone number 1-800-HURT-911, vanity phone numbers for lawyers and Parker Waichman Alonso’s new vanity phone number 1-888-BIG-CASE.

Once you decide on on the direction of your brand, never forget it and never deviate from it. I noticed two recent examples of brand deviation or destruction by major corporations.

Recently, Domino’s announced that (after 40 years) they discovered their pizza wasn’t good! Can you imagine that? So they reinvented their pizza and recent advertising has focused on nothing but how proud they are of their new taste.

Domino’s became a $1.4 billion company with bad pizza because they hit on a great niche with a great brand slogan “30 minutes or it’s free”. Apparently, their customers liked bad pizza, never cared and/or just wanted fast delivery. Now, they abandoned their brand and have to compete on taste. But after trying it yesterday, I don’t think that’s going to be successful.