Peter Wilken: The Biggest Branding Mistake Financial Advisors Make

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What does it mean to own a territory in the mind, and why is that a key to building an unforgettable brand? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Peter Wilkin. Peter is a global brand strategist. He's the author of Dim Sum Strategy, and he's the former head of BBDO Asia Pacific, where he advised iconic brands like Coca-Cola, Disney, and McDonald's. In today's conversation, Peter explains how financial advisors can powerfully differentiate themselves in a crowded market by uncovering and articulating their brand DNA, which means what do you stand for, who are you for, and how do you uniquely deliver value. Peter also shares a clear roadmap for owning a mental territory in the client's mind. He shares practical messaging critiques on some advisor headlines on their websites. And he highlights the emotional side of branding that most professionals overlook. We also explore how to simplify your message, when to be boldly polarizing, and why brand building starts with doing, not saying. With that, here's my conversation with Peter Wilkin.

I define brand as the territory in the mind that you own. It doesn't exist in tangible form. It's used in many different ways. So people will talk about a brand as if it's a can of cola on a shelf, and that's legitimate if that's what it means to them. But it's really not. It's an intangible set of associations that exists only in the mind. You can't touch it. But you can create that perception.

So you've worked with some of the largest, most well-recognized brands in the world. So I'm gonna say a few of these names that I know you're gonna be familiar with, and I'd love for you to tell me like what first pops in your mind in terms of what territory in the mind these brands occupy.

Oh my gosh, you're really gonna make me. Okay, okay, that's good.

I'm gonna put you to work here. Okay, these will probably be easy for you, but I'm gonna throw a couple in there that might be a little more difficult. Okay, Coca-Cola.

Everyman, universal appeal. When you say Coca-Cola, I always go to that amazing commercial with I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, where everyone is brought kind of joy and happiness, and it is ubiquitous. Okay, then let's contrast that with Pepsi, which was the choice of a new generation and intentionally repositioned as younger, more irreverent would probably be a word that would also get associated with that. And typically, I'm going beyond your question here, but typically in any category, it's dominated by two strong brands, a leader and a secondary challenger who takes an opposite positioning. Coke is for everybody and it is wonderful outside giving love. Pepsi is positioned really for the younger, for the ones who are discerning, the choice of the new generation, the ones who are a bit more adventurous, who think for themselves, who don't want the norm, who want something different. And in terms of scale and size, it doesn't limit your sales, that positioning. It's a very powerful positioning to have. So yeah, funnily enough, I work for both of those brands. They're incredibly different in their culture, They're both fantastic organizations to work with, adopting very different ways of doing business.

Speaking of differentiation, and at the risk of going off on a tangent here, I think you and I are probably fairly similar in age, and I know you're going to remember this, but talk about Coke and Pepsi trying to differentiate themselves in the cola space. Then we had 7Up several decades ago who positioned themselves as 7Up the un-cola. And so how do you think about, say, what 7Up did back in the day versus what Pepsi and Coke are trying to do to differentiate themselves within the same cola space? 7Up says we're a lemon-lime drink. We're not a cola.

Yeah, that's fine. But you'll find that these big dominant brands are actually portfolios of brands. And so that they're all owned. And so they're intentionally taking gaps in the market that fill up their portfolio. So they fill up every gap that there might be in that tree. Not necessarily always the case, but that's certainly Coca-Cola strategy. And you'll find most large branded organizations like that will have a brand family architecture, a strategy to basically fill in the gaps. Yes, they will try and distance themselves from the main cola brand by positioning themselves as lemon lime. In fact, it started Fido Dido was the character that created character for 7Up more than the lemon-lime positioning. Mirinda was the orange one within PepsiCo, which we helped differentiate through the orange men taking off the Blue Moon group. And then you expand out into waters, fruit juices, everything else as well. So filling in those categories, there's a brand architecture portfolio strategy behind each one of those brands' unique positioning.

And since we're talking about drinks here, how about Starbucks? What do they own?

They put coffee on the map, or what I would call coffee in a cup and premium coffee. They did an amazing job of owning that territory. So everybody else now is an imitator. It's a rather broad category to own, but they own it.

So we've got big companies like Coke and Disney and Starbucks, and they've got a gazillion dollars that they can put into their branding and marketing and creating experiences. But then we've got other companies, like a lot of folks listening to this might have a million in revenue or $5 million or $25 million in revenue. So how do you think about the ability of a smaller firm to create a brand? And do they really have the ability to own a space in in people's minds if they've got a small budget like that and maybe they're not a national brand, maybe they're just more of a local brand?

The reality is all of these big organizations started off as small organizations, and same with creative ideas. Well, the big creative ideas that are championed now all started off as small creative ideas that had to be nurtured. If you remember, my original definition was own a territory in the mind. What I say with smaller companies, startups, solopreneurs, the vast majority of the GDP of America and the rest of the developed world is in small companies, companies of 1 to 10 people or less. So they don't have huge budgets, but you can define your territory. And I've always said, look, you can choose to try and ring fence Texas if you want. You can spend your whole time trying to mend the fences because competitors are knocking it down. Your herds are escaping. People are attacking you from behind when you're in the north, they're coming from the south, or you can choose to find a high hill. You can build a castle of stone and a moat around it, and you can defend and build from your territory there within a component of Texas. That's what you need to do. And then you expand that and you'll find that is all the case. Even those brands with multi, multi-million dollars to to spend and don't get it right, and they can't own everything. You can't have high frequency, high coverage, high impact in terms of what you're spending on your media. You would go bankrupt even if you were in the billionaires club. So you have to narrow focus, and that's what I suggest you do. Find your hill that you want to take over and build your castle on and expand out from there.

So oftentimes we advise financial advisors to find your niche. So figure out what is that space that you can own. In your experience, what are some of the questions that a financial advisor or even any type of personal services provider, it could be a consultant, what types of questions should they be asking themselves to try and figure out what space can I own?

When I coach all my brand strategists and they come, the first thing to say is niche down, niche down. Yeah, you said you're going to be in pets supplies. What do you mean? Oh, you mean actually, oh, you're a dog walker. I see. No, you're not a dog walker. You're a Dachshund walker. And you think, oh, okay, come on. How narrow can you go? You end up narrowing so narrow that you limit your opportunities. So it's good to narrow focus, but you don't necessarily have to narrow focus in the category. For example, with my consulting business, which is all around really brand DNA and helping organizations truly articulate who they are, what they stand for, to whom and why. I haven't said I'm just going to go into the hospitality sector, although we've done Shangri-La on the peninsula and all this. I'm going to go into the insurance sector, even though I've done AIG, AIA, Avviso. I'm going to go into the financial services sector or whatever it was. I've kept it incredibly broad, not that I'm doing it right necessarily, but by way of demonstration, I've consulted to charitable foundations, branded cities, done small YouTube companies selling men's hair care products, structural engineering firms, global tourist firms. I've done that by narrow focusing people's attention on what I do, on what I offer. Helping them direct the brand DNA. In fact, I do a ton more than that. I lead change management through an organization, but starting from brand DNA. So you can narrow focus. I still think with financial advisors, they tend to be where they're successful, lifelong relationships. So at some point, you've got to get onto that trust cycle and there's always a leap of faith. Your financial advisor is probably one of the most important people in your life to bring financial security, and it's somebody you need to trust and respect. Sometimes that human element of fallibility, of vulnerability, of making mistakes, I found, is not easy to share, but it's exactly what your customers want to hear because they want to know that you're human as well, like them. So find your, what I would call, not niching necessarily, find your narrowing down position that people can remember who you are.

So one of the things that I often say to advisors is, as you think about, let's say, your website, for example, and the very top part of the website before you scroll, that's the most valuable real estate. And so what is that real estate going to say so that when someone lands on your website, what do you want them to know about you within a few seconds? And so I typically will say, there's 3 questions that a visitor to your website wants answered quickly. Number 1 is, what do you do? Number 2 is, who are you for? And number 3 is, what outcome am I going to get if I do something with you? And so I oftentimes will evaluate a website just very quickly with that shorthand, with those 3 questions. And ideally, your website's gonna answer all 3 of those quickly within the headline.

Yeah.

Or at a minimum, 2 out of those 3. So, I don't know if you have any thoughts about that or if there's other questions that you think about. And that I think helps you really clarify what is your niche. Like, what do I do? Well, I'm a, you know, comprehensive wealth management is what I do. Who are you for? I'm for business owners and ultra-high-net-worth families. And what outcome do you achieve? We help you retain more of what you work so hard to build. Yeah, so I guess you could argue that's perhaps a niche, but it's a pretty broad one, and a lot of wealthy people could fall into that.

It's really good that you're thinking that way, and many people don't think hard enough about it. My old boss David Ogilvy used to say 80% of the message is in the headline. There are so many out there, what he would call headless wonders, where you actually have not got a proper headline in there and there's no encapsulating thought. If I was brave and courageous as an advisor to you, which I am, modestly, I would say you can't squeeze 3 things into a headline. You should be focusing on the last. What's the customer-oriented, what's in it for me message? Let them give the benefit first in your headline. You can explain what you do and why and who you are later underneath that very quickly, but it should be a benefit-driven headline. And the number of times I keep saying to people, Come on, it's not about you and don't show me your face and please no more kind of talking heads spewing stuff at me. Tell me what you're doing for me. That's what they want to hear. Be benefit-oriented, be customer-oriented.

So I'm going to share a few headlines from some, I'm going to leave anonymous financial advisor websites here. I'd love to get your critique on these.

Oh my God, they're all going to be brilliant. Oh, by the way, I qualify this by saying anyone who's going to my website and said, well, you're not doing it very well. Follow what I say, not necessarily what I do. We're all slaves to the SEO engine at the moment. Now I have certain things that I would express differently, but my SEO advisor says you've got to put this in here. Otherwise you're not going to get the organic search that you want. Yeah.

Speaking of that, I am going to go to your website if that's all right. So, so looking at the headline, so looking at the headline, it says brand strategy that means business. And then a subtitle below that is Build a Thriving Business Centered Around Your Brand DNA. And then it's got a nice picture of you with just a very few words that describe who you are. So tell me a little bit about that. You mentioned it's maybe that's a little more SEO driven, but if you weren't a slave to SEO, would you be doing something different with that?

Probably not so different on that one, to be honest, because it leads you into a story. You can't basically explain what brand-centered management or even a brand DNA is in a full headline. But you can communicate what it is that most people want, a thriving business. And what you need to have a thriving business, you need to be well positioned. You need to be relevant and compelling and differentiating and engaging and all of the things I was talking about earlier. So it leads you into the story, but you should be able to get something positive out of it. For me, the reason why I, and I do occasionally rotate those headlines, is brand strategy that means business is really leading into where I'm going with my business side, which is transitioning slowly out of the eat what you can kill day-to-day consulting, which I enjoy and I love. But as you and I, we're contemporaries and you can see we've both got, let's just say our gray hairs are showing through.

Wisdom and experience.

Yeah. So I'm finding joy and fulfillment and scaling and giving back much more through my online course and program in the Lighthouse Brand Strategy Academy. I've set up an online program called the Chief Brand Officer Masterclass. So that brand strategy, meaning business, is geared towards the small business owners, the solopreneurs, and the brand strategists who want to level up their brand strategy skills by getting into that program and coaching. So that's why that headline is rotated in there now, and it's a little bit more self-serving and less doing what I say you should be doing than it should.

Okay. So I actually want to, I want to zoom out for a minute before I share some of these titles on the website, because there's a lot of hard work that has to go into identifying what your brand is, building your brand before you do some of this fun stuff of coming up with your tagline and your collateral material and all those things. So walk me through how you work with a firm that says, yeah, we have a brand, but my goodness, there's so much more that we could be doing here. What's the process that you would go through to say, again, we really need to clarify our brand DNA?

I should underline again is that there's a misperception that you own your brand, not your customers. And I always try and reorient that and say, look, your brand isn't what you say it is. Your brand is what people think it is, that territory in the mind and how you're perceived. So you start with a discovery process of actually saying, what actually do people think of us? And it's astonishing the number of times that I will talk to CEOs and their leadership teams, and they will think that they know, but they are incredibly busy on their day-to-day tasks and running their businesses. Some of them occasionally have got their finger really on the pulse, but Most do not, or they'll think or regurgitate things which I think they want to hear or a bit more wishful thinking and not really understand that. So I always start the process and the brand-centered management process. People will have heard it. If anyone's done any reading on brands, they'll have heard of the 4 Ds process, which is discovery, definition, defining your brand DNA, direction, setting your strategic direction where you want to go, and delivery. Executing against it. That was what we wrote and developed in the Brand Company like 25 years ago and is the heart of the brand set of management process. So it starts with discovery and that discovery has what we call 5 C's: understanding your customers, obviously, your category dynamics, what are the conventions of the category, where can you stand apart, what's your competitive frame, what's the company dynamics and things like that. But the secret sauce I'm sharing with you and all of your listeners is you can shortcut the desk and now generative AI kind of aided research. That's one of the benefits of AI now. It can dramatically accelerate your homework that where we used to have to really go into libraries and flick through shareholder and company reports or ask researchers to help you in that. You can do that at the click of a few keys now with the generative AI search engines. You can, it's really brilliant for that. But the real value is still in the human direct interaction and doing in-person face-to-face in-depth qualitative interviews, asking a few stakeholders who've got a vested interest in the brand, who are close to the brand. So that would mean obviously management people, senior leadership teams within the company, CEOs, but also your customer base also. Some competitors, some of your key supplier partners, all of whom should want to see the brand do well, but have a different perspective. And asking the right people the right questions at the right time about how your brand is perceived, what your key challenges are, where your key strengths are, what value you think people are taking out, your loyal customers are taking out of you and why. How you are positioned, what they think their promise is, the what is it that you're giving to them that's different from everybody else? How do you go about doing that, your culture in a way that's distinctive? What might you be able to do differently? Those kind of key important questions, well asked, well interpreted. You can shortcut that process by finding the real meat of the relationship that customers have with your brand. How they actually feel and why they patronize your brand. And it could go from the extremes of almost zealot-like evangelists who say, I've been with this brand for 25 years, it was my father's brand, I've loved them, they've never let me down, they've been incredibly faithful to us even in times of trouble, they've seen us through, they put their own money in to help us over a difficult time, now we're wealthy, we can give it back and support. I would never ever change or consider anyone else. To, I don't really care, but I'm trapped in it. The cost of exit is too great, but if somebody better came along tomorrow, I'd jump tomorrow kind of thing. And numbers don't tell you that. If you're looking at performance sheets, it could be exactly the same kind of revenue profitability as a client, but one is absolutely singing your praises, the other one's ready to jump ship. So Understanding what's beneath the numbers. Most organizations, particularly financial organizations, favor the critical analysis of the numbers and the dynamics and where they're going and whether revenue is going up and profit is going up and not the underlying reasons behind why those numbers are moving that way.

Okay. So let's say we've gone through this process. Is it also fair to say that you go through this process first and then based on everything that you've put together, that's when you start looking at, okay, do we need to come up with a tagline? Do we need to come up with a title, a positioning statement, or what have you? Does that come at the end of the process?

It really does depend. There are some things that you can act on quite quickly, what we call quick fixes as a discovery insight. The main thing is key processed insights that go beyond typically what you would call or what you would think is classified as branding. The reason why we developed brand-centered management, myself and two colleagues in Hong Kong, was that we felt that millions and millions of dollars were being spent on what we call the superficial packaging of brands. That was logos, websites, catchy catchphrases, advertising that I've been spending my last 20-odd years doing and running. Communications, things that are tangible, easy to pay for, you can see, and that most leaders want. And they do first before they do their homework of truly understanding what it is that they should be in positioning themselves for, what their promise should be doing, and spending all those millions of dollars on the superficial side but not the substance of actually what your product or service delivers, the experience. Because that far overrides anything else that you say. You can say, Steve and Peter, they're brilliant. Look at Peter, what a stylish guy. But if I walk into the room in one minute and you can see that I'm dressed absolutely not in a stylish way, my wife would say it's completely undermined. The actual experience is not what you're saying or promising. Experience dominates. So that's what we focused on. And we were saying the whole point of the brand DNA was Here's a method of capturing and replicating or expressing a way of owning that territory in the mind in a rich way, but simple enough to be able to be memorable that directs what you do first as an organization, then what you say. So what you do is the products and services that you deliver. The experience is everything from how people feel about it, the interaction, the culture of your organization, those kinds of things. We also talked about systems and structures, efficiencies of being able to deliver your promise. They can enable or hinder you from being able to deliver your promise. We worked with one of the big regional fitness firms called Pure Fitness, and they expanded out to be one of the biggest in the region in the end, but they had their flagship in Hong Kong. Their major problem was retaining trainers that they had trained up and qualified long enough for them to be able to deliver this consistent experience. It's no good If you're a customer who comes in and you've absolutely loved working with so-and-so the trainer, and the next week you come in and they've gone and they've disappeared. So we had to develop a system for them that enabled a rotation of trainers so that there was always a degree of consistency. For example, that was a good example of experience over anything that they said in their flash posters or advertising. The actual experience is going to dominate. If there's any semi kind of graphic designers or creative types within your financial listening group here, I'm not saying that's not important, it's hugely important, but it's much better that it's done after the event. Don't say you're going to do something and then advertise it loudly. Do it and show it. Show rather than tell. We know all of these kind of clichés, but we don't practice them. And in particular with brand building, it's so much better to deliver against your promise and then look back at it and say, this is what we did for X, Y, and Z. We can do the same for you than making a promise that still hasn't been fulfilled.

We have heard often in recent years that people are more into experiences than things. And so how do we need to think about that when it comes to a brand? And I think what I hear you saying is one of the key things about a brand these days, and maybe always, but perhaps more so today, is we want to have this emotional connection to our customers and to our clients. And one way to do that is through the experience, through the interaction with the brand, as opposed to just wonderful slogans that are catchy and I can't get the choice of a new generation out of my head or what have you. So how do you think about the emotional connection in brand building?

I think it is the essential component that defines what a brand is. I think brands are emotionally driven and then rationalized by the brain. Heart, then head in all the strongest brands. And I think we are entering an era, particularly in the digital era and social media where we're obsessed with performance marketing and clicks and click-through and data analysis and Google GA4 and look at your data analytics and unless you can measure it, it's not important, blah, blah, blah, blah, that we are losing that emotional connection. Certainly the quality of communication in social media is dire. It irritates me so much. There is so much crap, really Dross, all samey looking, shouting, talking heads, basic color branding associations, but nothing really intimate or thought through. No creative idea. And I would say there are always exceptions. You could argue certain mediums like TikTok have taken over that role completely through the entertainment of it. When you are actually communicating or advertising or putting a message out there, you must justify that intrusion. You can choose to bang people over the head with repetitive, boring messages that eventually get through the skull after having irritated your recipient, or you can aspire to their intelligence and you can have them actively seek and suck up what information, what you're offering them, because they want to take it in. And obviously it's the latter that is much, much more rich and powerful in terms of impact. Than the former hitting people over the head repetitively. So you asked about emotion, but you can see I feel very strongly about it. I had a brilliant creative director in my old days when we worked on Guinness in Ogilvy in London, and he was the creator of the famous Pure Genius campaign with Rutger Hauer, which really turned the fortunes around for the Guinness brand. And he was famous for saying, stop scrambling for the rational differences. Look in the wide open space of emotional differentiation and how you make people feel. And that's how I still feel about creating positionings for brands. It's, yeah, very much heart then rationalized by the head. Even for supposedly rational brands, the classic one is Mercedes. If you ask anybody why they bought their new Mercedes, they'll tell you, oh, it's a century's worth of German engineering, incredibly trustworthy. My grandfather had one. Look at this, they never break down. Amazing value for money. My friend at the dealership offered me a deal. I couldn't resist it. It was like this, a million and one rational reasons for doing it. When actually what they want to say is, this is a statement of prestige. I've arrived for myself and for others. That's what a Mercedes says. They're never going to admit that.

There's so much I want to go into from what you've just said there. I do want to get back to some of these headlines on advisor websites, but I'm going to put that aside for a moment because I think we've got a rich thread here to go down. Social media is such a huge area and it's an important area for many financial advisors in that it's a way for them to get their message out, to get some content out there, to try and get and claim some real estate in a person's mind. Yet we also see that the people who in many cases get the most looks, get the most likes, get the most engagement are the ones who are provocative, who are controversial. And yet many financial advisors don't want to do that because they have a fear of, oh, I'm going to turn off some potential clients and I don't want to do that. So they end up going right down the middle. Oh, invest for the long term and diversify your portfolio. Okay. No one wants to hear that, right? That's not going to get me to read the full article about that. So how do you think about the world today where so many people, they want to get outraged and they want to read something that's either going to be their echo chamber that says, yeah, tell me more. That's exactly what I want to hear. Or it's the opposite and I'm totally outraged, and both of those can work. So in the world we're at today, how does a professional services person communicate in a way that is still professional yet still gets a message out there and gets people interested in wanting to communicate with them?

What a great insight and a great question. And it's gonna be a bit of a long answer because I'm clear on it, but it's not always Simple. There is no one right answer. It really does depend on the individual, but going back to your provocative, controversial, help me get outraged. There is a rule for getting noticed, which is rule number one of advertising, get noticed. Unless you get noticed, nobody is gonna read your letter. They don't receive your letter, but, and so many people get that or understand that, but do it in the wrong way. It has to be associated with be relevant. And so many people do the first but don't deliver on the second. So it's, look at me, I'm a naked lady, buy my matches. And you think, what? Naked man, naked lady, matches, whatever. No, there's nothing to do there. There's no relevance. And you see that all the time, all the time. And it just irritates people. It turns you off. If on the other hand, you have got something relevant to say that is arresting, that breaks the pattern of expectation, do it. It's so funny. Before we got on this podcast, I just wrote a short paragraph to one of the younger brand strategists, very smart young brand strategist I can tell, just beginning on her career in the Middle East, female, kind of used to maybe perhaps I'm generalizing, but more as having a suppressed voice. And she'd written a very good article on a book, which quite clearly she didn't really agree with, but was adopting the sense of sensible neutral stance. And that was great for us. Sometimes it's a perfectly legitimate strategy and a sensible thing to sit on the fence and just wait and see how things map out. But as I wrote to her, I said, you can't do that forever. You will not build a strong brand by staying in neutral. Your car doesn't move forward in neutral. You need to take a position and a stance, and if that means upsetting or excluding or insulting people, it means that. I said the strongest brands are the ones that have got clear lines of delineation. This is what we stand for and believe in strongly. If you believe in what we believe in, come to us. If you don't believe in us, you don't belong, and that's okay. We respect that, your difference. You go off and find your own other niche, but you're not us. So many people now in this world of DEI and wokeism are afraid to insult anybody or exclude anybody that you end up with this mishmashiness of dead litter leaves over the floor and no standout at all. So don't be afraid to say what you think. Obviously, you can temper that and you can find out with it whether or not it's appealing. Some people are naturally appealing and people will come to, and you can say some quite controversial things and get away with it. Others, people maybe find a little bit more abrasive. And so you could do that a little bit less, but don't be afraid of excluding some people because of what you believe in strongly. Once you've defined what those strong beliefs are, hold onto them if they're enduring, because you can have a debate. You always need to be open-minded, but if that's really what you believe in, go with it, run with it. That's who you are., and that's what you're going to find easy to support. A bit of a long answer, Steve, to that, because you do have to do that on a per-case basis. But for sure, I say have the courage and the boldness to support your beliefs.

Yeah, and I agree with that. And what I think people need to do first, and you may have touched on this a little bit earlier, is do the homework, do the introspection, and really understand what are my values, what do I believe and what am I willing to repel business because of this belief? And so I would imagine you would agree with this, that the best branding, the best marketing is both a great attractor and a great repeller. Because if you're just right down the middle, it's like you're not giving anybody a strong reason or a strong emotion to want to do business with you. So tell me what you stand for. Give me something to get behind and maybe I'll work with you. If I can get behind that.

Absolutely. I don't know whether this is going out visually or not, but I'm nodding my head furiously there because I'm agreeing with you completely. I also want to pick up on that point you said about doing your homework. What I encounter all the time is let's jump to execution before you do your strategy, before you've done your discovery homework, before you've asked those difficult questions. I encounter ready, fire, aim. All the time, and particularly amongst bigger, powerful organizations. And as you said, you, with your group, successful individuals who don't necessarily need to take good advice because they've already been successful, but that ready, fire, aim is always there. And I said, don't. Pause, take a step back, do your discovery work, understand how people are currently perceiving you, understand where your opportunities lie, where your key challenges are, all of those things I talked about earlier about values and whether or not your promise is clear. Do you have clarity and boldness in terms of what your positioning is? We talked about differentiation and in this world, particularly with social media, it's so cluttered. It's very difficult to be different from everybody. And I say, don't sweat it. Don't sweat it so much. It's good to be distinctive. You can be different in terms of, again, narrowing down in a different way. Maybe it's the geography that you are in. Maybe you own Wisconsin, maybe you own New Jersey or whatever. Maybe it's a particular type of investment. Maybe it's a style or a manner of communication in which you do it. I don't know, but there's many ways you can make yourself distinctive.

Yeah. And just to put an exclamation point on this piece here, you mentioned the word bold. I think that's great as you're communicating. If you're taking a position, be bold. But what frustrates me is not that people are bold or that people have a strong opinion, but it's the way that they communicate it in such a way that it belittles other people that may not have that opinion, or you're dumb because you don't agree with that sort of thing. I don't see much of that in the financial services industry, but there are definitely areas in financial services where Smart people can have a difference of opinion. One simple example is on a home mortgage. So, one financial advisor might say, "You're going to be better off financially taking out a mortgage and then taking the money that you didn't put in to pay down the mortgage, put that in the financial markets and invest it over time. After 10, 15, 20 years, you're going to have more money if you do that and have a mortgage." Someone else very reasonably might say, hey, if it makes you sleep better at night, if you don't like to have the debt, go ahead and pay off the mortgage. It may not be the financially optimal decision, but it might be the best decision for you and where you're at right now and just the level of risk that you want to take. Both of those are perfectly reasonable ideas that are totally opposite of each other. So, you can have a strong opinion one way or the other on something like that. Ultimately, the client gets to decide. What they want to do. But that's like a simple example of having an opinion on something, and people will gravitate one way or the other on things like that.

It's a great example, Steve. What people forget, unless they're more right-brained kind of creative thinkers, is that there's more than one right answer. Both those answers are right in different circumstances, and that's the truth. We tend to post-rationalize whatever decision we've made. So it's really difficult to go back in hindsight and look at those. But at the time of making a decision, there's always more than one right answer. And that's one of the key signs of determining real creative thinking. You don't stop at the first right answer. You go on, you push it.

It's like the old 5 whys from Toyota. Just keep asking why, why that, why? Just keep getting to the core. We want to unpeel the layers of the onions there. All right. So let's get back to a few of these titles on websites. I'd love to get your take on these. So here's one. You land on the page and the big title says Reinventing Family Office and Private Wealth Management. And then the subtitle is Elevating Founders, Entrepreneurs, and Ultra-High Net Worth Families to Harness Financial Well-Being and Simplify Lifestyle Complexity. Now, I think this is a great headline and we get back to the 3 questions that I had mentioned earlier about does it answer the 3 questions? So, one is, what do you do? So, headline, family office and private wealth management. Pretty clear. Who are you for? It says founders, entrepreneurs, and ultra-high-net-worth families. And then what outcome am I going to achieve by working with you? And they say, we're harnessing financial well-being and we're simplifying lifestyle complexity. So to me, it hits on all 3 of those buttons. I'd love to see what your thoughts are on that particular one.

There are bits that I really like about it, which is flagging down who it's for. Sometimes that's a perfectly legitimate thing, and it says, this is for you, attention this message, and not used enough. Very simple and basic that even as a subhead, it can still work like that. The second part, harnessing financial wellbeing. I'm not sure I know what you mean by that. And simplify lifestyle complexity. What do you mean? Are you going to help sort out the problems that I've got with my drug-addicted son-in-law? No, you're not. I'm being really provocative to make the point. The more single-minded that you can be in the benefit, the more likely you are that you're going to penetrate the skull. I've always used the example, if you throw 3 tennis balls at somebody, they can't catch any of them. They miss them. They don't know where to look. If you throw one ball at them, they can catch them with one hand, their weaker hand, left-handed. Boom. They know exactly what it is. It's difficult because you know that you do all of these other things, but what's the one thing that's really going to pierce the skull rather than a boxing glove that dissipates the energy, the force that you've got into it, into a broad area? Be the sharp, focused arrowhead point that goes straight through bone. And the minute you see 'and' in anything, it betrays. So if it's harnessing financial well-being, I would say, okay, you've got something there, but you're just at the first why. Let's go 3 or 4 whys down that and hit the thing that really catches the heart of the people that you're targeting. Harnessing financial well-being 'in order to give your kids the best chance of succeeding or doing, living a better life than you did,' or whatever. Again, I'm making it up on the spot, but you'll find something that's richer and really tight. That's a little bit critical because what you're saying is not a bad example. It's not one that I would say you've got to worry about changing tomorrow. But if you were really pushing it, you would push it the way that I'm suggesting.

So let's take a look at a second one. There's small print that says comprehensive wealth management. So they're basically saying what we do. And then the headline title here says, preserve what you've built, enjoy what you've earned. And then there's a subtitle in small print. There's actually 3 or 4 sentences here. Sounds simple, but wealth is complex. It can be difficult to feel confident, so on and so forth. Let our team of specialists analyze your wealth from every angle and build a comprehensive custom plan. So you can preserve what you built and enjoy what you've earned. Simple. And then the call to action button there says get started. So what are your thoughts on that one?

It's hard to disagree with. It's relatively generic. I would have liked to have known what is different about how you approach it. Something upfront that would give me a little bit more of a hook, but very hard to disagree with. And I would use— have heads nodding, I think, upfront. But if there was something to, yeah, give you that differentiating hook, what is it? The way in which you approach it? Have you got a philosophy that you can put in a simple sentence? Is there an area of financial investment that you specialize in? This probably needs a little bit of work on narrowing down.

Peter, I could talk to you for hours on this topic and you've got a couple books that you've written as well. So any final thoughts, comments, observations as it relates to branding that you want to share here?

There is so much jargon and complexity and confusion in the world now of brands and brand strategy. So much jargon out there. It's not true. The, as you would be familiar in your world of financial advisors, you've got excellent, good, bad, indifferent. And downright dangerous, should never be certified. And it's the same with brand strategy. There's a few excellent people out there, some very good, some pretty average, some downright dangerous ones that should never be licensed. And I would say proceed with caution. Anyone who's trying to overcomplicate things or make out that our business is complicated, I wouldn't really listen to the best strategists really try and simplify it and boil it down and use a minimum amount of jargon, but encourage you to be bold and courageous when you're starting out building your brand. If you don't know who you are, what you stand for, to whom and why, how on earth do you expect other people to understand? You really need to start doing that with your homework. I found with solopreneurs, and particularly this would be relevant for independent financial advisors, that your personal brand and your commercial brand, there's a huge overlap of the way in which you think, your personal preferences, the style, and the way in which you communicate and do business impacts your commercial brand. Even if you have people working underneath you, you got a small company. So it's hugely important that you understand who you are, what you believe in, what you stand for as well. And there's techniques for being able to do that. So that's where I would start. And I would go back to what you said as well. Do your homework first. You can do some simple things. Ask people who know you well, who love you, who want you to see you do well. And just active listen with a couple of real questions. What is it that people think about when I say Steve Sandusky? What's the first thing that comes to mind?

Peter, this has been great. I know you've got a website, which is peterwilkin.com. That's P-E-T-E-R-W-I-L-K-E-N.com.

I've literally just launched the small ebook called The Ten Commandments to Build a Strong Brand, and it's a 12-minute read. It's written what I call in Zillennial style. So it's very visual, big headlines. We talked about the meat of each one of these 10 commandments in one page. And it basically is the 10 essential things that any brand builder needs to know in a very short read. And it's a loss leader to the other book, Dim Sum Strategy, which is the meaty proper book, if you like, which describes the brand-centered management process. How to build your business around centering around your brand and how to develop your brand DNA and the 4 D's process. That's all in there. Yeah. And then the Lighthouse Brand Strategy Academy basically takes you through in a stepwise process, the first 2 D's, the discovery and definition, how to define your brand DNA in 6 modules, very comprehensive, 40+ short 5 to 8 minute instructional videos and lots of material to back up that. Which I support with my own little community and circle. You can talk to— I have biweekly cohort sessions and then interactive sessions with other people who are going through the program so you can share your journey with it, which is the way I think that the world is going away from the big social media platforms into these private communities.

All right. That's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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