CASE STUDY: When the Right Answer Was Not an Ad Campaign

A note on this case study: This engagement was led by Cheryl Lewis, Co-Founder of Obsidian North Partners, prior to the firm’s founding. We share it as founder track record representative of our approach.

CLIENT Regional Wealth Management Firm

SECTOR Financial Services / Investment Advisory

TIMEFRAME 12 Months

OUTCOME #1 Name Recognition Among Target Audience

THE SITUATION

Three Firms Were Asked to Pitch an Ad Campaign. We Stopped to Ask the Important Questions.

A successful regional wealth management firm was evaluating three marketing agencies, all of whom were prepared to pitch advertising concepts. We took a different approach. Before presenting anything, we asked the client a single question: What do you believe an ad campaign will actually do for you?

Their answer — “brand recognition” — opened a more important conversation.

Our pushback wasn’t contrarian. It was professional. We had reason to believe that a traditional advertising campaign would not only fail to deliver the recognition they sought, but might actively work against their goals.

We shared three critical observations:

01  The Name Was Working Against Them

The firm’s name was too generic to build meaningful recall — no amount of advertising spend could overcome that structural disadvantage.

02  Their Audience Required Precision, Not Reach

Clients with $1M+ in investable assets are not persuaded by broad awareness campaigns. Reaching them required targeted, credibility-driven strategy.

03  Research Had to Come First

Any strategy without research to back it would be guesswork. Real insight — from real audiences — was the only sound foundation.

10% INVESTED UPFRONT IN RESEARCH Use a fraction of your budget to understand your audience before you spend the rest trying to reach them. Research isn’t overhead — it’s the multiplier that makes everything else work.

90% DEPLOYED WITH PRECISION AND IMPACT

We Listened Before We Planned

Before a single dollar was committed to campaigns, creative, or media placement, we invested in understanding the landscape — who the client was really trying to reach, what would actually persuade them, and what stood in the way.

This is the Obsidian North approach: use roughly 10% of your budget upfront on research, so the other 90% doesn’t get wasted on strategy that feels right but isn’t.

We conducted in-depth qualitative research across four distinct groups: current clients, prospective clients, individuals who had considered but not chosen the firm (“lost” prospects), and financial media professionals. What emerged was a clear and consistent picture — and it challenged several of the client’s assumptions.

→  Current clients couldn’t reliably recall the firm’s official name. They consistently referred to it by the names of the founding partners — and that was the version they trusted.

→  Financial media professionals reported being more likely to view firms with proper-noun names (founder-based names) as credible and authoritative compared to generic descriptors.

→  Prospective and current clients alike said they would be unlikely to choose an investment firm based on advertising. Third-party media coverage, however, was viewed as highly credible.

→  What ultimately drove decisions was not brand awareness — it was the people. Clients described the firm’s advisors as intelligent, empathetic, and balanced: able to both protect and grow wealth. They wanted to see that humanity on display.

“People don’t hire investment firms from ads. They hire people they trust — and they find those people through the sources they already trust.”

THE STRATEGY

A Plan Built from Evidence, Not Assumptions

Armed with research, we built a comprehensive strategy that addressed both the identity problem and the credibility gap — and put the firm’s people at the center of everything.

NAME & BRAND IDENTITY

We helped the client embrace what their own clients were already doing: naming the firm after its key founding partners. The new name was more distinctive, more credible to media, and — critically — more memorable. A full brand identity system followed, anchored in the new name and designed to project the sophistication befitting their clientele.

DIGITAL PRESENCE

We built a dynamic website that put the advisors front and center — not products or performance tables. Video content featured each advisor speaking candidly about their investment philosophy, their care for clients, and their approach to balancing preservation with growth. Media commentary and third-party coverage were integrated to reinforce credibility immediately.

TARGETED SOCIAL MEDIA

Research told us exactly where the target audience spent their time and what content earned their attention. We built a disciplined social media program — focused on LinkedIn and select financial platforms — that amplified advisor expertise, surfaced media appearances, and reached high-net-worth prospects through precise demographic and interest-based targeting. Every post served a purpose: reinforcing credibility, not chasing reach.

MEDIA RELATIONS

We developed and executed a proactive media strategy to position the firm’s advisors as go-to sources for financial journalists. By ensuring the firm was regularly featured in relevant financial media — offering substantive, quotable commentary — we built the exact kind of third-party credibility the research told us would move their target audience.

INTEGRATED CAMPAIGNS

Media coverage was amplified back through owned and earned channels — reinforcing the new brand identity and keeping the advisors visible to prospective clients in the most credible possible context: commentary they hadn’t paid for.

THE RESULTS

From Obscurity to #1 in 12 Months

AT 6 MONTHS Brand Recognition Soared Within six months of launching the new name, brand identity, and media strategy, recognition among the target audience had risen dramatically — validating both the rebrand decision and the research-led approach.

AT 12 MONTHS Highest Recognition in the Market Independent research tested name recognition across the five largest investment firms in the region — all significantly larger than our client. Our client ranked first among high-net-worth prospects.

 A smaller firm had outperformed larger, better-resourced competitors — not with a bigger budget, but with a smarter strategy.

THE OBSIDIAN NORTH DIFFERENCE

Invest 10% to Make the Other 90% Count

Most marketing budgets are spent almost entirely on execution — creative, media, production, placement. The research that should inform all of it is either skipped entirely or treated as an afterthought. The result is campaigns that feel right internally but miss the mark with the audiences that matter.

Our approach is different by design. We invest approximately 10% of a client’s budget upfront — in research, in listening, in understanding — so that the remaining 90% is never wasted guessing. In this case, that investment revealed that the client’s name was the problem, that advertising wasn’t the right channel, and that the people behind the firm were the firm’s greatest asset. Without that research, none of the strategy that followed would have existed.

That’s not a cautious approach. It’s the most confident one: spending money only once you know exactly where it will work.

True north isn’t found. It’s built.