Summary:
Loyalty is one of the most misunderstood concepts in financial services. Many advisors assume that loyalty stems from performance or returns, but the truth is far different: loyalty is emotional, not transactional. In this episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook, Mark Mersman challenges advisors to rethink their value proposition and focus on creating experiences that foster belonging rather than simply delivering services.
Drawing inspiration from five iconic consumer brands—Peloton, Apple, Airbnb, Disney, and Starbucks—Mark demonstrates how these companies have mastered the art of client retention through emotional connection and intentional design. Each brand offers a unique lesson that advisors can adapt to their own practices.
Peloton, for example, doesn’t just sell fitness equipment; it sells community. Its success lies in creating a sense of belonging through subscription-based engagement, charismatic coaches, and interactive leaderboards. Advisors can replicate this by hosting client-only events, building annual traditions, and even changing their language from “clients” to “community.” These small shifts create a shared identity and deepen emotional ties.
Apple’s approach centers on radical simplicity. From product packaging to user experience, Apple reduces choice and eliminates complexity, signaling competence and confidence. Advisors should take note: a streamlined onboarding process and clear service packages not only improve efficiency but also enhance client confidence. Simplicity isn’t just elegant—it’s powerful.
Airbnb offers another compelling example by humanizing its hosts and focusing on identity-based marketing. People prefer doing business with individuals they relate to, and advisors can achieve the same by showcasing their team’s personality and speaking directly to their ideal audience. Instead of emphasizing what you do, emphasize who you serve. This creates clarity and fosters a sense of belonging.
Disney’s magic lies in its obsessive attention to experience design. Every touchpoint is intentional, and every inconvenience is softened by thoughtful staging. Advisors should apply this principle to onboarding and milestone celebrations. Transform paperwork into a moment of excitement, acknowledge anniversaries, and find creative ways to turn inevitable hiccups into positive experiences. Emotions shape memories, and memories drive loyalty.
Finally, Starbucks proves that personalization and routine build comfort—and comfort builds loyalty. From writing names on cups to remembering customer preferences, Starbucks creates a sense of familiarity that keeps people coming back. Advisors can do the same by tracking client preferences, remembering family details, and proactively acknowledging life events. These small gestures create a personalized experience that clients value deeply.
The overarching message is clear: loyalty isn’t built in spreadsheets; it’s built in moments. Advisors who borrow from the best and apply these lessons will create practices that clients don’t just use—they belong to. And in a world where returns are commoditized, belonging is the ultimate differentiator.
Transcript:
Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial - Welcome back to another episode of the Playbook. Today I wanna talk about what billion dollar consumer brands understand about loyalty that advisors can really look at and learn from and essentially look to implement inside of their practice. Here's the reality. We've talked about this on this podcast in episodes past, but advisors aren't competing on returns. And what they're really competing on, or at least what we want to impress upon you to think about in terms of changing your value proposition is about the experience, right? And here's the deal, loyalty from a client perspective is emotional. Loyalty is not transactional. And the most valuable advisor-client relationships that exist out there feel belonging-based and not service-based. And for some of you that might hit you and might strike you and say, that's a different way of thinking about it. But the reality is, is that great brands don't sell products. They create identity. They create simplicity and they create community. And I want to go through and talk about five different companies out there, all of which you've heard of, and talk about something that they do inside of their business with their customer and client base that really elevates them and creates kind of a different experience.
And the first is Peloton. And I'm sure that you've heard of the Peloton bike. Obviously it rose to a ton of fame during the COVID lockdowns. But what Peloton does is obviously, yes, they sell fitness, but they deliver belonging. And so when you think about what they're doing, obviously their core product is a bike, but really what they are trying to sell and what their business model is based off of is that monthly subscription where you are buying into a community. And, you know, for the most part, their client retention, why clients and their customers don't leave is because they're a part of something. The other thing that they've done really interesting is that leveraging these coaches, they're putting personality out there and coaches feel personal, they feel like you have a personal connection with them. The other thing that Peloton does that's kind of unique is they leverage the leaderboard concept and leaderboards create a shared experience in this sense of group belonging. And, you know, it fuels a little bit of that competitive fire, but at the end of the day, it's really about the community piece of it. So here's the deal. Social identity, you know, people stay where they feel connected. And the truth is accountability and community essentially reduce churn, reduce quiet loss. And so what we can do from an advisor perspective when we think about this is really lean into some client only events, whether they're educational or social, your job as an advisor, especially if you're working in a local community, you know, this obviously gets more difficult if you're completely virtual based with your practice. But if you have clients that are all local or somewhat local to you, run some client events, try to build some annual traditions. So whether that's an annual holiday party or a summer barbecue or something that is consistent that your client base can continue to look forward to, because really what you're trying to accomplish is You want your clients to look forward to coming to your next event because they're going to see Joe and Sally that they spent time with and really enjoyed that time at the last event. So the more you can foster that community. And one little thing, one little tip to think about, I might consider changing how you talk about your clients, especially to them and to prospective clients. Use the term our community rather than our clients. Or maybe you're gonna pick a different term, our tribe or something to that effect, but something, and if you have a catchy brand that you can kind of tie in where you leverage or use your brand as a part of that community of people somehow, really kind of a cool way for them to look at themselves and feel a sense of community and belonging.
So that's one thing, one little lesson to take from Peloton. The next one is Apple. Obviously everybody is very familiar with Apple. What's amazing about Apple is they are probably one of the best at, once they've got you in their world, very rarely are people leaving Apple, right? They have diehard fans as it relates to the Apple brand. What Apple does really well, is radical simplicity with their messaging and with their design. Even just the clean simplicity of their boxes and how they package their product, they also try to reduce choices. And we talked a little about that in a past episode, the danger of giving somebody too much choice. They try to minimize the amount of choices that their consumers have to make. Clear paths ultimately lead to a predictable experience. Choice overload, again, we talked about this, it really kills confidence. And simplicity signals competence. So be thinking about that. Now, how can we as, know, in the financial advice space, translate that and use that messaging or that lesson into our practice? Well, think about what your process is. You know, as you're articulating, the process to your existing clients and prospective clients, how simple is it? How many steps are there? If it feels complicated, you're gonna get the resistance. We wanna have one clear onboarding path. The more that you create all of these one-offs inside of your business, number one, your team is gonna obviously not care for all the one-offs and the exceptions that need to be made, but your clients will also then appreciate that, hey, this is how business is done. Here's the onboarding path. They can understand it because every time it's the same. if they make an introduction to somebody, they can confidently say to that person, here was the experience. I'm sure you're gonna have the exact same one. And the other thing is if you offer service packages, whether you charge a fee for your time, think about bundling them differently so that you don't have as many choices for a consumer to make. So simple, a very easy lesson to take away, but radical simplicity is kind of the big win that we get from Apple.
The next one is Airbnb. Airbnb is kind of an interesting case study. The truth is they don't even sell lodging, right? I mean, we think about them competing against hotels. They are trying to do the exact opposite messaging of what a hotel brand might do. They're trying to create a sense of feeling like you belong. One of the ways that they do this is they humanize their hosts. So their hosts that own these homes or that are managing the home that you would rent from Airbnb are humanized. And so they're trying to bring them into the equation. And this has been something that has evolved for them over the years, but part of what that does is it's much easier to do business with people rather than companies. And also people enjoy doing business and they trust them more if they feel like them, if they can relate to them, if they understand them. So the of the takeaway here is identity-based marketing outperforms feature-based marketing. And so I would encourage you, know, as the takeaway from an advisor perspective, speak to who you serve, not what you do. And I think that's a really important lesson because now it's starting to give the sense of putting it out there. Do you belong with me or not? And so whether that's on your website, whether that's in language that you use during conversations, you know, think through, use language like people like you are who we work with or think, you know, rather than, well, we do this for such and such people, you know, we help people that are in this position. The other thing that I would really encourage you to think about is if you have a team, whether they're additional advisors or they're their administrative staff or marketing staff, whatever it might be, showcase your team's personality. You know, I think a lot of times. We're scared to put our personality out there for whatever reason. Some of it's done just because people don't, you you may not enjoy jumping on a video or writing blog posts or creating social media content. But I think the more that you can find ways to showcase the people that make things happen inside of your business and the people that your clients and prospective clients are going to work with every day, the more we can demonstrate who they are, who their personalities are, the things that they enjoy, it endears people and creates that sense of belonging. the simple message here is that we work with people who want clarity, not complexity. And the more that we can help those people understand who it is that you are, who your team is, and we can display that and create a sense of feeling like these clients belong here and that we want them here is a big win.
The next one that I wanna talk about is Disney. I mean, we could do a million podcast episodes on some of the things that Disney does well from an experience standpoint. Probably the big takeaway from Disney is they have such an obsessive attention to experience design. And this continues to evolve. They are constantly looking at ways to improve the experience. Every touch point at Disney is intentional. You know, if you've ever taken your family to Disney, we did that a couple of years ago and it's like, it has always blown my mind at how well they are at extracting money from your pockets. Or you put a magic band on and you can wave it around and you can pay for just about everything under the sun. You know, people remember that emotions shape our memories. And so the more that we can be thinking about what that experience is like that we're creating, the advisor application for this is very easy. I mean, the easiest one is in the early stages of this relationship with a prospective client, existing client, what is the onboarding experience going to look like? And if the takeaway from the onboarding experience just feels like paperwork and not a celebration and excitement, something that the client should be really looking forward to and is emotional about. If it's all about paperwork, if the thing that sticks out in your client's mind about their experience coming onboard as a new client of your firm is, there was a lot of paperwork or we had to do a lot of this digital stuff here, then you've missed the boat. And so I want you to really think about some of the things that you can do that will help design a better onboarding experience. The other thing that I would, I would stress to you is, you know, find a way within your CRM to, to figure out how to celebrate milestones. You know, whether it's, know, length of time that they've been a client of the firm and You celebrate an annual anniversary or a five year anniversary somehow, whether it's a small gift, whether there's a meal, whether there's some sort of acknowledgement publicly about it, but celebrate some of those milestones and think through what ways can we elevate the experience.
The other thing that I will tell you is, as you know, in this industry, especially as you bring a new client on, you're moving money around, things will get goofed up, you know, a transfer gets delayed, you missed a box on a piece of paper, whatever it might be that that is going to happen. What is it that we can do to make that feel like such an insignificant inconvenience that it really becomes a non-factor. You think about this with Disney, Disney you know, over the years had issues with long lines and boy, it's brutal to wait in the hot Florida sun or California sun. And, and so they found ways to number one, shorten the line through these fast passes. There's also a way for them to make more money, through, through some of the fast pass ideas, but they also staged other things that I guess are make the inconvenience of waiting in a line a little bit more enjoyable. You know, many of the lines at, for a Disney ride have movies or they shuffle you through the line into different staged experiences along the way. Really all they're doing is trying to make the fact that you've got to wait 45 minutes or an hour and a half a little bit more tolerable. And actually they're trying to put a little bit of an enjoyable spin on what would normally be a pretty uncomfortable and miserable experience just sitting, especially if you've got little kids pretty miserable experience. You can think about doing some of the same things within your practice so that, you know, as that process of a transfer or the onboarding might get delayed or have a hiccup, you know, maybe you introduce, you know, somewhere halfway in between, hey, we're gonna go out to eat, or I'm gonna take you to lunch, or we're gonna have a check-in call and it's gonna be something about not, you know, not financial related, whatever it might be. Think through some ways to better that experience during the onboarding side of things. The last company I wanna talk about today is Starbucks. Starbucks has had obviously a lot of attention given to it. It's still remarkable to me. The fact that they sell coffee, which is this commodity that is so cheap in the grand scheme of things, yet they manage to get people to cough up five, six, seven bucks every single time for their coffee. little things that they do. mean, they do personalization, right? So they write your name on the drink. They understand your routine. A lot of people are so routine with the time, the days that they are going to get in their coffee. So the convenience of their process and then the personalization, you know, they make the app, they make that the process very easy and convenient. That forces a habit. And that forces people to want to continue to come back. And that familiarity builds comfort and comfort builds loyalty. So, you know, think through what the advisor application is here. So things like tracking your clients' preferences, knowing about life events and being proactive as it relates to some of their life events. You know, whether it's congratulations or condolences that need to be given. Knowing family names. mean, I this is a such a small thing but you know if you're proactive during those meetings and you're asking about their grandkids baseball game that that you know that they had you know things like that I think that's a big part of really peeling back that next layer of How do I create this welcome? personalized comfortable experience and remember the small things. know, advisors, the end of the day, we don't need to reinvent marketing.
You know, I would encourage you to think through borrowing from the best, looking at the things, you know, as you go through, go to a business and, you know, if you see things that they do well, or you, you you question, wow, why do they get so many customers coming back and back? Take note of what it is that they're doing well and look through, is there something that we can do inside of our practice to essentially mimic what XYZ company is doing? Here's the deal. I'll sign off with this. Loyalty is not built in spreadsheets. Loyalty from your clients is built in moments. Have a great one. Take care.
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The Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook is a podcast/video series for high-performing financial planning professionals that are committed to improving their craft, helping their clients, and growing their business. Hosted by Mark Mersman, Chief Marketing Officer at USA Financial, this series contains a wide variety of content – from quick win ideas to long-form interviews, each episode provides actionable marketing ideas and insights that can be implemented easily into your practice. From digital marketing to traditional direct-response marketing, each episode delivers straight-forward and engaging content that any financial professional can use to improve their bottom line and grow their practice.
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