Try this experiment. Take ten brochures from ten different wealth managers, insurers or challenger banks. Cut off the logos. Now try to work out, from the language alone, which one belongs to which company. It’s genuinely hard. Nearly everyone wants you to know they are “trusted,” “expert,” and, my favourite, “client-centric.” Agencies can be guilty of this too.

It’s not that any single firm did anything wrong. Each made a sensible decision, at roughly the same time as everyone else, and the result is a category where being credible and expert-sounding has quietly become the least differentiated thing you can be. It isn’t a lack of creative thinking. A bold idea gets a compliance review before a media plan, understandably so, and “credible” becomes the safe choice. The catch is that safety, chosen by everyone at once, stops being safe and starts being invisible. It’s the marketing equivalent of a school photo where every child looks the same, and you, as the parent, feel guilty as it takes you more than a second to find yours.

So if being expert and trustworthy is table stakes, what’s left to choose you on? For a lot of firms, the honest answer has become price, a good short-term lever but a fragile long-term strategy, since a competitor can match or beat it tomorrow. Cheap doesn’t equate to value, and “cheapest” is just temporary, at the whim of too many external and macro factors.

This is where the real opportunity sits. Decades of marketing science, from the IPA to WARC to Binet & Field, etc., make an optimistic case that you’ve likely heard before. Brand isn’t a cost competing with the “real” commercial work, it’s one of the most reliable commercial assets a financial services firm can build. It lets a firm charge a fair price without being cheapest, and be the name that springs to mind first, not from shouting loudest, but from years of being recognisably itself. Most of that shows up on the P&L two or three years out, which is why firms who commit early get a head start. We are increasingly performance focused, that the 2-3 horizon to see the real impact feels too much like a risk but it is proven to work.

Monzo is the example most FS marketers reach for. It has invested for years in a distinctive card and a genuinely likeable personality and it’s impossible to walk around London without seeing them on the Tube or the side of a bus. That said, when did you last see a Monzo ad for a specific rate or fee? You probably can’t, and that’s the point. It’s a chandelier effect; light the brand well enough and it illuminates every product beneath it, without each needing its own spotlight. Creativity and brand building compound each other this way, which should be good news for the CFO, since the answer isn’t a bigger budget, it’s a sharper one that proves out.

Trust gets built the slow way, by being recognisably the same brand in a downturn as in a boom, and by turning up consistently rather than declaring yourself trustworthy once, loudly, in the strapline, then disappearing. 

None of this requires shouting, or abandoning the credibility that got every brand to where they are today. It just requires giving hard-won expertise a shape nobody else has, distinctive enough that the brochure test would work in reverse. Monzo didn’t get there by being loud. It got there by being unmistakably itself, long enough that the brand now does the selling product ads used to do. Stop whispering the same thing.