Consider the financial adviser who has a respected firm behind her and a prospective client in front of her. Between them sits a small problem: the client must decide whom to trust. The company’s advertising can introduce the name. It cannot conduct the conversation. HNW built a business around that distance, supplying the research, language and communications tools that might help close it.
THE STORY IN FOUR POINTS
- HNW served wealth and asset managers, advisers, luxury brands and philanthropic organizations.
- Its offering joined marketing services with eSuite communications software.
- Its research challenged easy assumptions about affluent buyers and adviser marketing.
- The company describes its operating chapter as 2001–2016.
01 / THE HANDOFFA campaign needs someone to carry it
HNW’s initials named its territory: high net worth. That gave the New York business a specific audience, but also a complicated route to reaching it. Wealth firms sell through advisers; asset managers need to engage wholesalers and intermediaries. A message can be approved at headquarters and still arrive badly equipped for the person expected to use it.
The firm offered strategy, market research, creative campaigns, product launches, content and sales enablement. Alongside those services sat eSuite, its SaaS communications platform. Historical descriptions of the adviser product mention email marketing and e-newsletters. The combination put HNW between an agency and a software provider, with financial-services expertise supplying the connective tissue.
This was a business selling to businesses, even when the ultimate audience was an individual millionaire. The useful distinction was its attention to both ends of the relationship. A broad advertising agency could create a campaign. A communications vendor could distribute a message. HNW’s proposition connected audience understanding, creative execution and the adviser’s practical need to keep in touch.
Research the audience and define the message.
Create content and communications advisers can use.
Carry the message into a client relationship.
02 / THE PERSONAL BRANDThe adviser had already noticed
In August 2010, HNW surveyed 623 advisers. Seventy-six percent said they relied more on their own marketing than their firms’ promotions. About 70 percent did not use social media for business and marketing. Company restrictions, burdensome processes and uncertainty about implementation appeared among the obstacles. The person carrying the relationship often had the least freedom to communicate.
The findings also placed trust near the center of the problem. Eighty-four percent ranked consumers’ lack of trust in financial services as their leading barrier to personal success. Read together, the results suggest a distribution problem as much as a branding problem: firms needed credible people in conversation with clients, yet made some of those conversations difficult.
“If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, it’s almost as if you don’t exist.”STACEY HAEFELE / HNW CEO / NOVEMBER 2010
03 / MONEY HAS MOTIVESTwo Ferraris, two different purchases
The same refusal to accept a convenient label appeared in consumer research. In 2011, psychologist Peter Noel Murray described a study his company conducted for HNW. An expensive car could express an owner’s appreciation of design and engineering. For another buyer, the attraction could be membership in a recognizable elite. The price might match; the reasons did not.
The research also explored the reverse effect. A prestige brand could clash with a wealthy consumer’s self-image. Some admired Rolex craftsmanship; others found the signal pretentious. Luxury marketing therefore involved more than making everything look expensive. A brand needed to understand what owning its product would say about the buyer, including things the buyer would rather leave unsaid.
For marketers, the implication is wonderfully inconvenient. A balance sheet identifies purchasing capacity. It does not supply a personality. HNW’s specialization made sense because the apparently narrow category contained different motives, tastes and fears. Treating wealth as a complete customer description would erase precisely the differences that useful research could uncover.
04 / NEW MONEY, NEW LANGUAGERich on paper, busy at work
Stacey Haefele, HNW’s president and CEO, also urged wealth firms to notice the younger people acquiring stock-option wealth through technology businesses. In a December 2011 interview, she discussed the prospect of a new affluent audience emerging around technology IPOs. These people might be more absorbed in their work than their money, and unfamiliar with the financial needs arriving alongside it.
A concentrated stock holding was one example. The appropriate opening, in her account, was a gentle discussion of needs. Younger prospects were skeptical of sales pitches, resistant to jargon and inclined to consult multiple references. This was an argument for earning relevance through subject matter. The adviser needed a useful reason to enter the conversation, beyond announcing that a prestigious institution existed.
05 / THE BUSINESS BEHIND THE IDEAAn agency with a software habit
Co-founder and former CEO Sandy Demitroff brought experience from Worth Media and Worth.com, where her responsibilities had spanned content, design, commerce and technology. HNW’s later record included a company-reported B2B Best-in-Show Portfolio Award in 2008 and a place among Gramercy Institute’s 20 Most Valuable Partners in Financial Marketing in 2015. Those are signs of industry recognition, rather than measurements of client returns.
An archived company profile reports that HNW served 19 of the top 20 US wealth management firms. The figure is best read as a historical reach claim, with no ranking date attached. Even so, it helps explain the appeal of specialization: a small agency could know a customer ecosystem well enough to be useful across many large institutions.
Dealroom records an approximately $3.8 million Series B in November 2003. That figure describes financing, not what clients paid for campaigns or software. The commercial logic paired professional services with a SaaS offering: expertise helped shape the communication, while software supplied a repeatable means of delivering it. The historical model gives the article its practical interest.
06 / THE USEFUL INHERITANCEWrite for the next conversation
HNW’s own retrospective closes its business chapter in 2016. Its ideas remain useful as a brief for someone building a marketing program: distinguish the buyer’s motives, identify who owns the relationship, and give that person material worth using. Bring the communication channel into planning early. A beautifully phrased message has limited value if the adviser cannot send it.
That approach depends on permission, adoption and useful content. A newsletter cannot manufacture trust in poor service, and personal communication cannot compensate for misunderstanding the audience. HNW’s interesting contribution was to place those dependencies in the same picture. Before asking how loudly a firm should speak, ask what its people can usefully say.