Most finance brands are talking to a ghost

Yes, you read that right. A ghost.

A boring, middle aged, middle class audience they have invented in their heads. And they talk as if that person is the only one in the room.

Nobody ever decided this. There was no meeting where a firm agreed to write for an imaginary person. It just settled in over time, the way house styles do, and now the ghost sits in every review and quietly approves everything.

How the thinking goes

The logic runs like this. The information is data heavy, so it has to be dry and dour, with no real story behind it.

Seriousness gets confused with dullness. Rigour gets confused with density. Somewhere along the way, a belief took hold that if you make finance interesting you must have made it less accurate.

So they throw out numbers. Piles of them. Charts that need three minutes of study. Percentages with no reference point. Basis points with no translation.

And they aim them at an audience they assume already knows the jargon.

Truth is, most people have not a clue. That includes plenty of people who nod along in meetings, and a fair number of people who work in the industry.

What is actually going wrong

They are not selling the story behind the data. They are just dumping numbers and hoping for the best.

Nobody cares about a dry figure on its own. A number in isolation is not information, it is raw material. What people care about is why that number matters and what it means for them.

Inflation came in at 3.1 percent means nothing by itself. Inflation came in higher than expected, which is why the market has pushed back its expectation of a rate cut, which is why your bond fund had the week it did, is a story. Same data. Completely different value to the person receiving it.

The second version is not less accurate. It is more useful, and it took no more words to say.

The job was never to dumb it down

This is where the objection usually arrives. That simplifying is patronising, or that a sophisticated audience does not need hand holding.

The job was never to dumb finance down. It was to make the data come alive.

Take something dry and jargon heavy and turn it into a story people can relate to. Give the number a before and an after. Say what it changes. Say who it affects and how.

Sophisticated audiences want that as much as anyone else, they are just too polite to say so. The professional allocator reading your note has forty other notes to get through. Clarity is not a concession to them, it is the reason they read yours first.

Where to start

If you want a practical test, take your last client update and go through it line by line with one question. So what?

Every number that cannot answer it either needs the answer added or needs to come out. Most notes get a lot shorter and considerably better.

Then look at who you imagined while writing it. If the honest answer is nobody in particular, or a vague professional figure with no real characteristics, you have been writing for the ghost.

Pick a real person instead. A client you spoke to last week. What do they already know, what are they worried about, and what would make them put the phone down feeling clearer than when they picked it up.

What people remember

Because at the end of the day, folk do not remember the data.

They remember what it meant. They remember the explanation that made something click, and they remember who gave it to them. That is the whole basis of trust in this industry, and it is built out of moments of understanding, not volumes of information.

What is a piece of finance content that actually made you stop and understand something?