How AI and Carl Jung can improve your brand story
We use Chat GPT to assess Fidelity Investment’s brand archetypes and how their home page can better align with their dominant archetype.
How branding saved the banks
This spring I lost my faith in branding (and lots of money) when First Republic Bank collapsed. And then I found it again in 7 painful steps.
4 brand insights from magical croissants
There’s a reason Trader Joe’s is one of America’s most beloved brands. In fact, there are four remarkable reasons.
My work
Michael Simon started two companies and both went public. For a third act he’s taking on the wealth management industry. His team of quants and programmers create technology that makes remarkably sophisticated investing available to individual investors.
He hired me to tell this story.
The key customer insight is the desire to win, to outperform. It doesn’t matter what the market is doing—what matters is that NDVR clients feel they are doing better than their peers. So, NDVR’s one simple truth is the promise of ‘extra’ performance—made tangible and believable.
The visual brand—think Gucci sex meets geek smarts—reinforced the power identity inherent in the story.
For 100 years TIAA served as the financial provider to non-profits. The company delivered retirement security for university professors well before social security. And yet as the company grew the products increased and the mission fuzzy.
As the head of brand strategy it was my job to re-find the TIAA story.
The key consumer insight is that consuming fear of running out of money in retirement. And it just so happened that TIAA’s core product and revenue driver, solved for this fear. The company had simply forgotten how powerful a product it was. No other company promised to share their profits with customers in the form of higher payouts that ‘never ran out’.
By highlighting our ‘sharing the profits’ story we tapped into why employees joined TIAA in the first place—to help those who do good, do better.
Sometimes the story is the experience. Sure, you can say we make things easier and simpler. But that’s a story that has to be experienced to believe.
I spent seven years as a leader of Fidelity’s digital team on a mission to make the investing and saving experience as intuitive as possible.
I led a team of writers, designers, videographers, developers, illustrators, and strategists. Our greatest strength was the ability to collaborate across a complex organization, across technology, legal, compliance, operations, product, and marketing teams. With such an array of sometimes mis-aligned groups it could have been easy to let our organizational jockeying become the customer-facing story. And yet we didn’t. The focus was always on the experience of making something easier and simpler for our customers.
Fidelity
My story?
I’m a dad to two wonderful women. I’ve lived around the world. Scratch golfer until the left knee gave up the ghost. I believe you find meaning and joy in doing really hard things. I believe in qualitative insight over quant. I believe the most important element in business success is bravery.
And I love finding that one true brand story that can help your business thrive.
Media
You Shoulda Been There — 2021 podcast interviewing me about my role in early Internet site development for British Airways, Gucci, and others.
OMMA Keynote Speech — 2012 speech to the Online Media, Marketing and Advertising organization about the success of digital video.
Essay on what I learned after leaving corporate America to drive Mayor Pete around Iowa in the 2020 Presidential Election.