Morgan Stanley
| Author | Ed Dinger, Kim Kazemi, Debbi Mack, Kevin Teague |
| Pages | 1047-1059 |
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1585 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
USA
Telephone: (212) 761-4000
Fax: (212) 733-2307
Web site: www.morganstanley.com
NOTE: Since the initial writing of this essay Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. shortened its name to Morgan Stanley. The essay continues to refer to the company's former name, as that was the official name of the organization when the campaign was launched.
After Morgan Stanley Group Inc. merged with Dean Witter, Discover & Company in 1997, the resulting company retained Dean Witter's well-established tagline "We measure success one investor at a time." With the advent of the twenty-first century, the firm toyed with new taglines, eventually settling on "One client at a time." Although sounding similar in nature, the new tagline reflected a transition in the firm's marketing approach, which now emphasized a commitment to long-lasting client relationships. In 2004 Morgan Stanley and its longtime advertising agency, Leo Burnett, launched the "At Your Side" advertising campaign, which took the concept further, showing Morgan Stanley financial advisers acting like close family members in a series of humorous television spots. The goal was to address everyday financial needs with which the audience could relate, such as paying for a child's college education or wedding or funding early retirement.
The television spots in the "At Your Side" campaign, accounting for the bulk of Morgan Stanley's $80 million budget in 2004, continued to be shown in 2005. Each relied on an attention-grabbing trick: leading the viewer to believe that a Morgan Stanley adviser was a close family member. One commercial, for example, showed a couple sitting on a beach. The man—who thought he knew how to tweak the couple's investment portfolio so that a dream house could be bought—turned out to be a Morgan Stanley adviser. The real husband was napping on his wife's lap and popped his head up when he learned the good news.
The "At Your Side" campaign won awards and helped Morgan Stanley elevate itself above a crowded media landscape. Its success did not, however, ensure that Leo Burnett would keep the business. With the installation of new leadership at Morgan Stanley in 2005, the advertising account was put into review, and rather than participate, Leo Burnett severed a 17-year relationship with the client.
For old-line firms like Morgan Stanley, involved in selling security brokerage services to the public, the conventional marketing approach for many years had been to emphasize knowledge and competency—essentially conveying the message "We're the experts"—while projecting a sense of trust. For many years Salomon Smith Barney employed actor John Houseman, who intoned, "They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn
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it." Another (now defunct) firm coined, "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen." During the 1980s Dean Witter, before merging with Morgan Stanley, used the advertising slogan "You look like you just heard from Dean Witter." During the 1990s it proclaimed, "We measure success one investor at a time." When Dean Witter and Morgan Stanley merged in 1997, the tagline continued to be used by the combined retail business.
With the rise of Internet brokers in the 1990s, financial advertising took a dramatic turn. Newcomers like E*Trade Group and Ameritrade Holding Corporation spent heavily to establish their brands using irreverent humor and by treating stock trading as a game and mocking traditional stockbrokers. They appealed to a young, broader demographic, leaving the old guard like Morgan Stanley to appear stodgy and only interested in already wealthy customers.
In the 2000s Morgan Stanley began to adjust its approach. It tried to skew to a young demographic in the retail business while promoting its electronic capabilities, as evidenced by new advertising campaigns developed in 2000 by Leo Burnett that eschewed the "one investor at a time" tagline to center around a new tagline, "Well Connected." The implication was that Morgan Stanley combined electronic connectivity with the insider relationships of a well-established firm. Likewise an institutional campaign launched in 2001 relied on the tagline "Network the World."
The bull market of the 1990s gave way to a recession, exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For the past 20 years Morgan Stanley and other firms offering investment services had spent a great deal of money appealing to small investors, but that strategy no longer made sense. Cheap online transactions had taken all of the profit out of the transaction side of the industry, eliminating the executional advantage that financial firms had long held. Now the likes of Morgan Stanley found that their profits were in dispensing advice—independent, trustworthy advice.
In 2002, after five years of integrating the Dean Witter operations, Morgan Stanley decided to consolidate its advertising account at Leo Burnett, which was charged with creating a campaign that sought to present a unified message behind all of Morgan Stanley's products and strengthen the Morgan Stanley brand. A new tagline was crafted, one that would provide resonance with the firm's past while continuing to develop a new approach to reaching out to potential customers: "One client at a time." The goal was to portray Morgan Stanley as a firm that despite its size cared about customers on an individual basis. The initial television spots showed Morgan Stanley advisers talking emotionally about how they helped their clients. In one commercial a couple was helped to retire to Paris, while in a second a daughter's tuition to the Julliard School was the subject. In 2004 Leo Burnett pursued similar themes using humor in the "At Your Side" campaign, which continued to use the "One client at a time" tagline.
Morgan Stanley's "At Your Side" campaign targeted retail customers, the focus on partnering with baby boomer parents (roughly 40 to 55 years of age), the kind of people who might be dealing with early retirement or their children's weddings. The younger investors that the TV spots of the previous two years had hoped to reach were not the primary concern, nor were people past retirement age. The new campaign, rather, centered on the needs of upper-middle-class parents, either married or single, or empty nesters looking to take the next step in their lives. These people had no illusions of becoming day traders and wanted the kind of asset-management services that a website or their local bank was unable to offer. Although Morgan Stanley no longer courted small investors, there were still plenty of potential customers. At the start of the twenty-first century, some 11 million households used professional financial advisers. That number was expected to grow to 60 million within 15 years.
The "Morgan" in Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company refers to the legendary banker J.P. Morgan, who in the late 1800s and early 1900s was one of the most powerful men in the world. In 1935, 20 years after his death, J.P. Morgan & Company spun off its securities and investment banking businesses as Morgan Stanley & Company.
There was no shortage of entities hoping to carve out a share of that huge market of potential customers. Electronic brokers like E*Trade and Ameritrade remained competitors for Morgan Stanley, primarily because they spent a great deal of money on advertising, their ads were attention getting, and their marketing at the very least created a great deal of clutter in the marketplace for investment products and services. But given the kind of people the "At Your Side" campaign hoped to appeal to, Internet rivals were not primary concerns. Competition instead came from other quarters.
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Increasingly insurance companies and banks encroached on Morgan Stanley's turf, all of them attempting to provide customers with a one-stop shopping center of financial services. Mutual fund companies, such as the Fidelity Group and the Vanguard Group, also provided competition. In addition Morgan Stanley had to contend with competition from rivals in the retail/wholesale financial-management sector. They included longtime king Merrill Lynch as well as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup subsidiary Salomon Smith Barney, and Charles Schwab.
The strategy behind the "At Your Side" campaign on the consumer side was to continue the "One client at a time" theme and further position Morgan Stanley not just as a firm interested in helping clients build wealth, but as a firm whose advisers cared about customers' lives and were as committed as a member of the family in helping them realize their cherished dreams. Morgan Stanley was not alone in pursuing the partnership theme, however. Writing for U.S. Banker, Matthew de Paula quoted Bill Wreaks, publisher and chief analyst of the Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, who commented, "This whole notion of partnership is very evident in a lot of financial advertising…. What makes that different from the past, is that before it was like 'We're the experts, we...
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