Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Ethical Influence as the Core of Institutional Finance Marketing
We have drawn down more decency than we have replenished. But the deficit is catching up with us, and the bills are now coming due.
Decency deficit: The accumulated cost of years of extractive, short-term thinking in communication, marketing, and influence. It is what happens when manipulation replaces respect, noise replaces depth, and transactions replace trust.
The squandering of decency has been pervasive, from digital marketing to public discourse, professional communications, and interpersonal relationships. It started slowly and then accelerated over time, intensified by digital platforms that reward emotional extremes, marketing strategies that treat people as “targets” rather than decision-makers, and a broader cultural drift toward expedience over integrity.
Now, the bills are piling up higher than our culture’s ability to pay them. Content marketers are being replaced by AI because much of the content being produced is already superficial, formulaic, and interchangeable. Social cohesion is fracturing as online discourse rewards the loudest, most exaggerated voices while punishing nuance, reflection, and restraint. And trust in institutions is deteriorating as vapid, cruel politicking puts volume over credibility, leaving people exhausted and skeptical.
I can’t pretend to be able to solve an entire culture’s problems. But I can contribute to pieces of the solution in marketing for institutional finance and capital markets. In these areas, the decency deficit is particularly costly. The marketing playbook borrowed from consumer brands and mass SaaS B2B—hyper-personalization, lead-gen funnels, engagement hacks—was never suited for an industry where decisions carry enormous financial, regulatory, and reputational weight.
Why Institutional Finance Marketing Is Different
The responsibility of marketing in institutional finance extends far beyond immediate business outcomes. It also informs decisions that affect global markets, economic stability, and long-term financial health.
This unique position demands a fundamental shift from traditional marketing to stewardship—a role that involves careful guardianship of both information and trust. Just as financial institutions themselves act as stewards of capital, their marketing must act as a steward of knowledge and decision-making capacity.
For example, if somebody buys a can of soda they don’t like, it’s not that big of a deal. But if someone chooses a bad solution for processing trades or transactions, the consequences can be massive. Decision-makers in financial institutions are fiduciaries responsible for capital allocation, market efficiency, risk mitigation, and compliance within a complex regulatory and geopolitical environment.
In this context of stewardship, the most effective marketing in institutional finance doesn’t hook, manipulate, or coerce. It respects the intelligence of its audience, providing them with the insight and clarity they need to make sound, forward-looking decisions.
In addition, the role of marketing should focus on decision enablement because professionals making choices are already deeply engaged in their industries. They need clarity, insight, and a genuine understanding of their challenges.
Thought leadership is essential to this dynamic. It clarifies complexity, reduces uncertainty, and builds trust. Each communication, campaign, and interaction becomes an opportunity to demonstrate expertise, foster genuine understanding, and strengthen the intellectual foundation of the industry.
Marketing as a Means of Repayment
The unique nature of institutional finance creates an opportunity for paying down the decency deficit by fostering real expertise and elevating substantive insights over empty, performative content. Marketing’s “repayment plan” involves three core components: elevating real expertise instead of producing content for content’s sake, treating decision-makers as intelligent professionals instead of conversion statistics, and speaking with empathy and respect instead of relying on superficial engagement tactics.
Companies that embrace a decency paradigm achieve three positive outcomes. They build genuine intellectual capital, developing insights that help decision-makers navigate complexity with greater confidence. They establish themselves as trusted advisors rather than mere vendors, creating relationships that persist through market cycles and economic shifts. And they also contribute to a more robust and resilient financial ecosystem where decisions are made based on genuine understanding rather than marketing pressure.
This approach creates a virtuous cycle: as companies invest in substantive communication and genuine expertise, they strengthen both their competitive position and the broader market environment. The result is a more sustainable, non-extractive form of influence predicated on contributing to decision-making.
Using Decency as a Cultural Advantage
When marketing prioritizes manipulation over substance, it reinforces a wider cultural drift toward superficiality, an erosion of trust that extends far beyond business. By undertaking marketing as a form of responsible stewardship instead, we can create lasting value for individual institutions and the broader society they serve.
The impact of this transformation ripples outward through our entire information ecosystem where marketing shapes not just purchasing decisions but our broader social dialogue.
On a broader scale, decency is about good governance, deep and diligent thinking, and treating people as full human beings in everything we do. That’s why failures of decency ultimately have societal consequences, weakening the foundations of informed decision-making.
By contrast, societies that uphold decency foster stronger institutions, more informed decision-making, and a healthier public discourse. When decency is a cultural norm, societies are more cohesive and show more resilience in the face of crisis.
By restoring the balance between extraction and contribution in our marketing and communications, we strengthen both our businesses and our broader social fabric.
Perhaps then we can begin freeing up cultural capital to invest in rebuilding our reserves of trust, creating a surplus of decency for future generations to draw upon.
Three Grace Notes
“While we are quickly evolving into Homo empathicus, our entropic debt is shadowing our steep climb as we approach the summit of global consciousness.” —Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
“Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” —Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
“Imagine the stories we will tell, the institutions we will build, and the lives we will lead when we affirm that every person is a person. Imagine the world we will birth when we see no stranger.” —Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
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