Spend half an hour looking through the websites of financial services businesses and you’ll start to wonder whether they’re all working from the same brief. Clients come first. Long-term relationships. Trusted advice. Good client outcomes. Somewhere you’ll almost certainly find a variation of “what matters to you, matters to us.”
I’ve worked in finance marketing for more than a decade and I’d be willing to bet I could guess at least two or three of your company’s internal values without ever visiting your website. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re almost always the same.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about positioning in regulated industries. Most firms haven’t failed to differentiate because they’re constrained by regulation. They’ve failed because they’ve mistaken professional credibility for competitive positioning.
They’re very different things.
Consumer Duty is a convenient explanation because it absolves marketers of responsibility. If regulation forces everyone to sound alike, then there isn’t much anyone can do about it. It’s a comforting narrative. It’s also one I don’t believe in.
The FCA doesn’t require you to tell prospective clients that you put them at the heart of everything you do. It doesn’t insist you talk about trusted relationships or long-term thinking. It certainly doesn’t mandate the language you use to describe your proposition. Regulation sets standards for how you behave. It doesn’t dictate how you position your business.
The sameness we see across financial services is largely self-inflicted.
I think the industry has fallen into a trap of its own making. Somewhere over the past twenty years we’ve come to believe that professionalism has to look a certain way. It has to be measured, corporate, risk averse, and carefully balanced. Above all else, it has to avoid saying anything another firm or prospect might disagree with.
That might reduce the chance of upsetting someone. It also removes almost every opportunity to build a distinctive brand.
The irony is that financial services has generally become more sophisticated than ever before. Looking specifically at wealth management, advice processes are stronger. Governance is better. Investment management has become more robust and operationally efficient. Standardised propositions, centralised investment teams and model portfolios have solved genuine business problems and, in many cases, improved client outcomes.
I don’t think standardisation is the enemy.
The problem starts when operational efficiency becomes the story you’re trying to sell.
The more firms describe advice as a process, the more clients begin to assume that every process is broadly interchangeable. That’s how industries become commoditised. Not because the underlying expertise disappears, but because marketers inadvertently teach buyers that the expertise doesn’t vary very much.
Anyone who has spent time around exceptional financial advisers knows that’s nonsense.
The very best advisers are remarkably scarce. They combine technical competence with judgement, commercial awareness and an ability to navigate uncertainty that simply can’t be reduced to a flowchart or a suitability report. Two advisers can follow exactly the same regulated process and still deliver completely different outcomes because the value isn’t created by the process. It’s created by the thinking.
Scarcity creates value.
Yet our marketing rarely reflects that reality. Instead, we present advice as though it were manufactured on a production line, wrapped in reassuring language that every competitor is using at exactly the same time.
That’s why I think so many positioning conversations begin in the wrong place.
Marketers obsess over finding a unique value proposition when they should be asking a much simpler question.
What has the rest of the industry accepted as normal that we fundamentally disagree with?
I’ll be sharing more on how to specifically answer this question in a future article.
People often describe this as finding a villain. I think that’s a useful way of thinking about it, although the villain is rarely another company. More often it’s an accepted truth that nobody has bothered to challenge.
Apple didn’t build one of the world’s most valuable brands by declaring war on Microsoft (okay, well sort of). But what it really did was challenge the idea that computers had to feel cold, corporate and inaccessible.
Patagonia wasn’t built on better jackets. It challenged consumerism in a way that felt like a fight for doing the morally conscionable thing.
The most memorable brands don’t just explain what they do. They reject something that everybody else has quietly accepted.
I think wealth management has its own accepted truth.
We’ve convinced ourselves that being professional means being corporate, and being corporate means sounding exactly like everybody else.
Some of the most respected professionals in the world have unmistakable personalities. Scientists. Surgeons. Elite sportspeople. Entrepreneurs. Their credibility comes from expertise, not from suppressing their point of view.
Why should wealth management be any different?
The answer, I suspect, is fear.
- Fear of saying the wrong thing.
- Fear of not being compliant.
- Fear of excluding potential clients.
- Fear that taking a position will inevitably alienate someone.
The result is messaging designed to appeal to everyone. Unfortunately, messaging that appeals to everyone is rarely remembered by anyone.
That becomes even more challenging inside larger organisations.
I’ve worked for multiple businesses with thousands of employees and hundreds financial advisers. Creating a distinctive brand at that scale isn’t simply a marketing exercise. Every adviser has their own style, every team has its own culture and every acquisition brings another interpretation of what the business stands for. Marketing’s job isn’t just to communicate a position externally. It’s to create one that hundreds of people can genuinely believe in and consistently represent.
That’s significantly harder than building the personal brand of an independent adviser.
It also makes conviction even more important.
Imagine a wealth manager making the statement:
“Advice so good you won’t need to speak to us.”
Most firms would never publish it.
Some would argue it undermines the value of ongoing advice. Others would say it’s commercially reckless.
I’d argue it demonstrates confidence.
Whether you agree with the statement isn’t really the point. At least it expresses a belief. It tells you something about how that business sees its role in clients’ lives. Compare that with another promise to put clients first and ask yourself which you’re more likely to remember a week later.
Too much of wealth management marketing has become an exercise in polishing accepted norms. Trust. Integrity. Long-term relationships. Good client outcomes. These things matter enormously, but they’re the price of admission, not a source of competitive advantage. Clients should assume they’re true before you’ve said a word.
Positioning begins where expectations end.
The firms that build genuinely memorable brands over the next decade won’t necessarily have better advisers or better investment propositions than everyone else. They’ll simply have the confidence to challenge an accepted truth about the category while everyone else continues repeating the same promises they’ve been making for years.
