Today, the Financial Communications Society's April luncheon was held at the Princeton Club in New York City. Stephen Cone held forth on what is going wrong and right in communicating with potential clients. This is the first in a series of two articles. Today, the bad -- tomorrow, the good.

Morgan Stanley's new slogan, "Move your money," prompts retail investors to ask, "Move it where?" according to Steve Cone, managing director and head of global marketing at SSB Citi Asset Management Group. The confusion reflects the advertising challenges that financial services firms face, and Cone highlighted similar marketing lowlights at the Financial Communications Society's April luncheon.

Cone led off the disapproving discussion of current creativity by citing the advertising disconnect that marketers encourage: the aesthetics of airbrushed models fail to touch actual retail investors. "We're creating a homogenized image [typical] of Kodak advertising," said the former Fidelity president of retail and corporate marketing. "Things blend together in an industry where products look the same, do the same, and sound the same."

Although the industry turned the marketing faucet on all the way between 1997 and 1999 (streaming the amount of media dollars spent from $1 billion a year to $1 billion a quarter), financial firms failed marketing 101, said Cone, by testing retail loyalty with the advertising clutter of financial figures, jargon, and awkward product names -- a cycle made vicious by cramming the failure into copy-intensive ads.

Additionally, the symptoms of what Cone calls "merger-itis" confuse the targets of an advertising outreach, citing the mergers between JP Morgan, Chase, Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter, Smith Barney, and others. "Where's EF Hutton now?" asked Cone, bringing attention to the wisps of loyalty attached to disappearing institutions.

"We're changing our tag lines too much, and they didn't even resonate in the first place," said Cone, expressing disappointment with strategy equivocation AND the disappearance of good copywriters. "We need to have our feet held to the fire." 

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