When asked to write marketing copy for a client, I’ll focus first on covering the points the client wishes to convey. But that’s the easy part. The real challenge lies in formulating content in the company’s individual style.

By “style,” I mean the distinct tone of language that reflects a company’s voice and character. It’s through style that a company differentiates itself, communicates its value proposition and sets the tenor of its relationship with clients.

While a company’s communication style can often be described in general terms, the ability to capture that style in written communications—to strike that characteristic tone that the company claims as its own—can be elusive. Why? Because in many respects, style is nebulous. You may recognize the difference between styles when you see it. But the nuances may be difficult to navigate and can make for a bumpy ride.

Many companies have formal style guides that provide writers like me with helpful pointers regarding tone and language: Be straightforward. Avoid jargon. Write conversationally. Strike a balance between conciseness and detail.

But no style manual, however comprehensive, can cover all the possibilities in terms of word choice, sentence structure or overall flow. For all these, judgment calls are required.

How does a writer make them? Experience and intuition can help. Over time, a writer can become sufficiently familiar with a company to divine what sounds, looks and feels suitable—and what doesn’t. Do the words reflect the company’s vocabulary, culture and tradition? Do they match what the company’s clients have come to expect?

It often helps to think of a company in human terms: How would you describe the company’s personality? How would the company speak to its audience?

Consider two hypothetical financial institutions: One is professorial in character; the other is savvy and advisor-like. The professorial company’s white papers reflect a more formal, expositional style—the kind you’d associate with academic journals. That style is fitting, because the company has sizable research divisions, employs legions of economists and seeks to promote these resources to sophisticated investors.

The savvy-advisor company wants to be perceived as a partner you can call up anytime—perhaps to request a clear explanation of a complex topic. In its written communications, the savvy-advisor company favors a telegraphic style typified by bulleted lists and sidebars to articulate key messages and basic concepts. Its style is more advisory than expositional.

Both companies provide similar services. But imagine how they might convey the same message in writing:

Professor: For the investor population, exchange-traded funds have democratized access to an array of asset classes historically available only to institutional clients. Further, they introduce an economical alternative to mutual funds, providing comparable diversification as cost-advantaged vehicles.

Savvy advisor:  Exchange-traded funds can:
• Provide exposure to many different types of assets, including some that were once out of reach for certain investors
• Offer a low-cost alternative to mutual funds for diversifying your portfolio

Consider another example:

Professor: Investors are more defensive this year than last, and we’re observing a flight to quality, as our research indicates in Exhibit 1 below.”

Savvy advisor: Investors are being more cautious this year than 12 months ago, and we’re seeing a shift toward lower-risk assets, which you may wish to consider.

I’m not suggesting that one style is better. Both can be effective, depending on the kind of company, the type of client and the nature of the agency-client relationship. But the differences between them illustrate the sort of careful stylistic calls that marketing writers need to make every day.

It’s not that I’m a slave to style. I just have tremendous respect for it.

I’m not sure if our expectations just get higher over time, but this year, per my opinion and the water-cooler conversation I’ve heard, the commercials seemed to fall short. As I sit here, it’s hard for me to recall more than four or five of them, and given how much advertisers spent, I’m confident that wasn’t what they were hoping for. Even friends of mine in media, marketing and advertising agreed with me that it was hard to recall more than a couple of commercials and that they and didn’t really love any of them.

But they did hate one. Several people (note: women) I’ve talked to were “offended” by model Adriana Lima’s provocative ad for Teleflora.

“It’s not fit for family entertainment,” they said. “It was inappropriate and out of place.”

My response? The Teleflora spot was pure genius. Teleflora knows its target audience. A week before Valentine’s Day, most men are thinking only about the Super Bowl. Sunday night, 60 million of them are staring at the television screen. Enter Lima. For the first 90% of the commercial, no one knows what it’s selling—but no one can turn away. Men drool, women are curious. The commercial ends with a sexified Lima saying, “Give, and you shall receive,” with a vase of Teleflora flowers. “Sold. Whatever you say, Adriana” (note: men).

As I noted, many women, mothers in particular, have complained about the commercial. But Teleflora doesn’t care. Women weren’t the target demographic. They weren’t going to be buying flowers this week anyway.

Men, on the other hand, had no idea Valentine’s Day was even coming up. It’s football season. The TV had their attention in the first place, and Lima definitely didn’t make them turn away. The mental Post-it note that Valentine’s Day is next week now has “Give, and you shall receive” from Adriana Lima written on it…and that Post-it note glue just turned into Post-it note cement.

Marketing is about psychology. Know your target audience. Teleflora managed to tap into everyone’s (not just men’s) primal instinct, and whether or not women were offended, they too couldn’t look away. Two days later, people are still talking.

OK—rationally, we know that “Give, and you shall receive” doesn’t mean you’ll receive from Adriana Lima, but it’s a message that taps into the unconscious. Sixty million men’s ids just screamed, “Dude, buy some flowers from Teleflora next week.”

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.

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.

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.