Financial services marketing and messaging often comes across as a sea of sameness. After all, nearly every wealth manager proclaims they can protect and grow your portfolio across multiple generations. Active investment managers laud their experience and ability to dig deep beneath the numbers. Banks promote security, protection and sometimes special promotional rates. Property and casualty insurers promise to offer the lowest premiums and to have your back better than anyone else should the unthinkable ever happen. You get the picture.
As a result, even multi-million-dollar campaigns often fail to resonate with their intended target, let alone grow the business, because they look and sound just like the competition. The refrain becomes so familiar that consumers tune out because they’ve heard it all before.
To illustrate my point, just grab the latest issue of your favorite financial magazine. You’ll no doubt run across ads from multiple companies in the same industry offering nearly identical value propositions. In flipping through a recent Barron’s on my desk, for instance, I found several investment management ads with familiar themes. One headline touts “outstanding performance.” Another boasts of being “disciplined” and “experienced.” A third claims to have investments that “outperform peer averages” over extended periods. All of which rhymes with what the majority of investment companies say.
So how do you rise above the crowd and make your message stand out?
In a sea of sameness, it’s essential to become the blue lobster of your industry.
Why a blue lobster?
The typical live lobster is dingy brown, olive-green or gray. This results from a combination of many bright colors in the pigment that get mixed together to create something more neutral. But in about one in a million cases, this normal color layering process doesn’t work as expected, and the lobster winds up looking bright blue instead.
It’s such an unusual sight that blue lobsters immediately stand out from all the rest. In fact, a fisherman off the New England coast recently discovered one of the rare crustaceans while examining his catch. He was so taken by its awe-inspiring appearance, he saved the lobster’s life and donated it to the Seacoast Science Center in Rye, where it was studied and displayed in a special tank along with some other unusually colorful creatures.
The point is, we don’t expect lobsters to be blue, so when we see one, we definitely take notice.
That’s why I tell clients in all segments of the financial services industry that they must strive to become the blue lobster of their industry, and convey this uniqueness through all marketing, advertising, media relations and overall outreach programs. This requires being acutely aware of the competition and major industry trends, listening to your customers, and thinking outside the box to ensure your message, approach and look are different from everyone else. Granted, you must stay true to your mission. But the presentation, words, techniques and channels you use to communicate with your audience are what will really separate your firm from the rest of the pack.
Frankly, this is where having an outside perspective can be very useful. Because internal teams are so close to the existing way of doing things, it’s often difficult to come up with that true blue lobster differentiator. This is something we help clients with all the time, and it is core to our innovative approach.
So, when it comes time to plot your next product launch or marketing campaign, we highly encourage you take our advice and think blue — blue lobster, that is!
