The first time I heard the term “financial products” was in the early 1980s. I found it odd.

I was writing an article about fixed income derivatives for the newsletter of a major bank. The product manager I interviewed referred to them as “products.”  I pictured boxes stacked on a shelf at Food Emporium, like Swiffer pads and Rice Krispies.

I’d always thought of products as things that were made in factories, transported by truck and sold in stores and auto showrooms.  A product had weight and substance—it took up space. If you used a product up, wore it out or accidentally dropped it in the toilet, you’d buy a new one.

Not so a stock, or a mutual fund, or a fixed income derivative. You can’t hold a mutual fund in your hand, wear it to the office, or serve it as part of a satisfying and nutritious breakfast.  Indeed, when you invest, you are buying something that doesn’t really exist, at least not in a physical sense. Whatever its performance in the past, your earnings will hang solely on what happens in the future.  If your investment evaporates like an icicle in July—well, there are no guarantees.  Buyer’s remorse carries a steeper price.

Purchase a smartphone or a tennis racket, in contrast, and you can feel reasonably certain you’ll get what you’ve paid for. True, calls sometimes get dropped, and strings may come undone with the first hard volley. But if that happens, you’re likely to have some recourse—especially if you paid extra for an extended warranty. Past performance pretty much does predict future results.

Small wonder that I wasn’t the only one who initially stumbled over “financial products.”  Before the early 80s, the coinage was all but unheard-of: Recently, when I searched for the term in the New York Times’ online archive, I found that it has appeared 1,185 times since 1981, but only seven times between 1851 and 1980.

Which leads one to ask: How did investments become products?

In fact, investments are products and always have been.  The dictionary defines product as simply “a thing produced by labor.” Chopin’s preludes, Shakespeare’s plays, and all 145 episodes of How I Met Your Mother are products. So are derivatives and mutual funds.

By the early 1980s, deregulation, heightened competition and the ensuing proliferation of offerings had impelled the financial industry to borrow the techniques and vocabulary of consumer marketing. “New-product groups at the major investment houses have a relatively brief history,” the Times reported in 1982. “Now, like ice cream, shampoo or frozen-pizza companies that depend on new products for survival, many investment banks are setting up groups of people to work full-time overseeing the development and marketing of…new or at least improved financial instruments.”

Financial products, of course, are intrinsically different from shampoo and ice cream, and it’s not just because they’re not stacked on shelves.  But a product is still a product.  At HNW, the marketing content we create for financial clients is always based on a clear understanding of the client’s positioning—who the client is, what it stands for, how it adds value. The positioning may be anchored in a key strength, such as the client’s research capabilities or its global footprint. Or it may grow out of the client’s understanding of its customers’ needs and aspirations.  But ultimately, the positioning traces back to what the company offers its customers—investments, information, insights and advice.

It’s been 30 years since I first heard those things referred to “products.”  Admittedly it took some getting used to. Today, I can’t think of a more appropriate term.

HNW’s latest WealthPulse poll is a survey of the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. We think the Occupy Wall Street movement, while making for interesting street theater, is more important as an indication of shifts in attitude and perspective among a sizable portion of the population. How has the conversation about wealth, monetary aspiration and financial services changed? How are the affluent reacting to the protests? How do they feel about the accompanying rhetoric that sometimes demonizes them and the financial institutions they do business with?

This all seemed like relevant points of inquiry, so we polled 100 individuals who belong in the top 1%. The results are surprising. To begin with, only half think they belong in the top 1%, a fact that sparked some heated comments when our survey was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report blog.

The profile that emerges from the poll shows that the 1%, while not feeling like members of a financial elite, consider themselves hard-working Americans who earned their wealth through the sweat of their brow, and while they don’t agree with the OWS protestors, and think the wealthy are being unjustly demonized, they agree that those responsible for the Wall Street shenanigans should be prosecuted; more dramatically, a sizable number think corporations are not regulated enough, and that that poses a threat to the U.S.’s economic future.

If you’d like to see the report, you can have it sent to you by clicking here.

A highlight of the Marketing Wealth Management summit in Toronto last week was seeing Tony Gurnsey, Wilmington Trust’s chief client advocate, discuss the evolution of the industry.

He compared the dynamic between the financial advisor and the wealth management firm to the relationship between a jockey and horse. Twenty-five years ago, he says, clients were more often drawn to a firm (the horse). Today, clients’ loyalty is with the advisor (the jockey). To take the analogy further, if the jockey changes horses, the client won’t stay with the horse, but rather follow the rider.

I hadn’t seen Tony speak before this event, but he came across as a vet to the wealth management business who wasn’t talking from a theoretical point of view but one shaped by many years in the business. The perspective he has about client loyalties is refreshingly real. He pointed out a dynamic that most wealth management firms (and their marketers) are all aware of but resist fully acknowledging.

Some of HNW’s own research digs a little deeper into this dynamic. We polled some 600+ advisors, at B/D and independent firms alike, to get a sense of how their marketing efforts have evolved since the recession began. A telling statistic was that almost half of them (more than 50% at brokerage firms) say they are now putting more emphasis on their “personal brand” than their firm’s brand. Is this intuitive? Of course. Advisors can control their own reputations by their actions and how they conduct their business.

What should the executives and marketers at wealth management firms do about this?

Embrace the dynamic. Top producers are not courted and recruited (i.e., “poached”) by organizations so aggressively because of an assumption that SOME of their clients will follow them, but because almost all of them will, as has been demonstrated time and time again.

Feed the horse. If the clients follow the jockey, that doesn’t mean the jockey can’t be tempted to follow the horse. There are countless ways firms retain and grow top talent (compensation, better products and services, tech infrastructure, etc.). What can the marketing department do to keep the advisors happy? Start by localizing certain marketing communications controls. Marketing should provide great content and convenient distribution tools for advisors, but let the advisors have some control over which clients get what materials.

At this very same conference, for example, a marketing VP at a large brokerage firm complained that the compliance folks put the kibosh on some kind of “Happy Halloween” announcement to his clients. The concern was that certain religious or ethnic groups might find it objectionable. Really? This is a good example of where decentralizing the communications decisions, and putting some control back in the hands of advisors, can go a long way. Marketing can ensure that the content is on brand and appropriate, etc., but let the advisors customize those communications and decide for which of their clients and prospects it would be appropriate. As firms struggle with the social media question, this same paradigm has to be followed for any hope of real adoption and effective use among advisors.

Empower the jockey. Our clients are CMOs and VPs of marketing. Their clients, in a manner of speaking, are the advisors. The advisors are the lifeblood of the wealth management firms. Like it or not, their clients’ loyalties are to the jockey—so listen and respond to what they are asking for. Consider the “Triple Crown” of advisor marketing: strong content, customization and convenience.

Between you and I, it does. But when I put the question to a friend recently, I was answered with a demurral. “Not so much,” they said.

If you’ve read this far, you may have flagged two lapses in grammar and word usage. “Between you and I” sounds right but is dead wrong. And, given that I was chatting with one friend, and not an army of them, there was no “they” to respond to my question.

Writing recently in the New York Times about the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, Joe Nocera referred to “the enormity of Jobs’s accomplishments.” He meant “enormity” in a good way, of course, as a synonym for “impressive scope”—or “enormousness” if you will. But he was in error: The word has nothing to do with size. An enormity, according to the dictionary, is “an abomination, an act of great wickedness.”

All of which begs the original question: Does proper English still matter?

Language evolves constantly, and many words and usages that would once have brought a wrist-slap from pedants and grammarians eventually find their way into acceptability. Some still reject “hopefully” as a stand-in for “it is hoped,” and insist that its only proper meaning is “full of hope”: He gazed hopefully across the room at the green-haired girl with the accordion tattoo.

That was once true. It isn’t now. “Hopefully” is a classic example of what lexicographer Bryan Garner calls a “skunked” word—one whose meaning has expanded or changed, but tends to annoy traditionalists even when used correctly. Hopefully, they’ll get over it.

These issues interest me as a writer, editor and marketing communications professional; they’re also at the heart of the messaging we create for clients, which should be clear, simple and conversational. The problem is that grammatical correctness is often the enemy of clarity and simplicity. Consider the noun-pronoun disconnect in the sentence “We help each client achieve their objectives.” Replacing “their” with “his” is grammatically correct but male-centric. “His or her” is also acceptable, but repeat it too often and it begins to sound clunky.

HNW copy chief Kevin Davies used to flag noun-pronoun glitches as a matter of course. Now he’ll occasionally let them stand. “It’s a matter of time before linking ‘their’ to a singular noun will be considered correct,” he says. Same for words like “media” and “data,” which are plural forms of “medium” and “datum,” respectively. But treating them as singular—“The media reports that the data is inconclusive”—is standard usage in many circles. Davies is fine with that too.

“When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” His thinking is scrambled: Language is mutable but it isn’t anarchic. Rules apply, whether you’re writing an op-ed column or a product brochure. At this point in time, enormity does not equal enormousness. And to “beg the question” isn’t to “raise the question,” notwithstanding its deliberately wrong-headed use above.

Someday, perhaps. But not today. Between you and me, there definitely is such a thing as proper English. And, yes, it does matter.