How to ensure your best messaging reaches the field

by Kevin Windorf, CEO, FCS; CMO, 2112 Communications

In asset management, a strong brand is essential—but if your messaging doesn’t reach the advisors who sell your products, your brand’s value gets lost where it matters most. This is the brand-distribution gap, and it’s one of the most persistent—and solvable—challenges in wealth marketing today.

At the top of the funnel, firms invest heavily in brand development and high-level campaigns. The positioning is polished, the narrative is sound, and the firm’s purpose is clear. But by the time that story makes its way to financial advisors, it’s can be diluted, misaligned, or missing entirely. What gets handed off is a patchwork of decks, one-pagers, and ad hoc emails—rarely tied to the brand’s strategic intent.

This disconnect isn’t just cosmetic. It undermines advisor confidence, slows adoption, and forces wholesalers to compensate with explanations and workarounds. It also puts firms at a disadvantage against competitors who consistently deliver clear, usable messaging at the advisor level.

So, what causes the gap?

First, the content pipeline is often built around investor communications—not advisor enablement. Marketing teams may produce top-tier thought leadership but fail to translate those insights into field-ready materials. The tone, structure, and level of specificity just don’t match what advisors need.

Second, brand and product teams frequently operate in silos. This creates fragmentation in how solutions are positioned across platforms and regions. Advisors are left to reconcile different voices and messages—or worse, to improvise their own.

Third, compliance timelines can grind momentum to a halt. Even when marketing creates content with the right intent, it often arrives too late to be useful—especially during volatile markets or timely product pushes.

Closing the gap doesn’t require more content. It requires a clearer strategy for how messaging is adapted, delivered, and reinforced across the distribution ecosystem.

Here’s what high-performing marketers are doing:

• Building advisor-first campaigns that reflect the journey from awareness to adoption
• Aligning brand, creative, and media under one outcome-driven brief
• Creating modular content systems that simplify compliance while supporting localization
• Reinforcing a single narrative across internal, intermediary, and investor-facing materials
• Tightening the feedback loop between sales, marketing, and media teams to improve campaign effectiveness in real time

Ultimately, the firms that bridge brand and distribution are able to tell a better story—and make it easier for their distribution partners to tell it, too.

In a crowded marketplace, this reinforced storytelling is a competitive advantage.