Commonwealth needed to strengthen its marketing approach to better support independent advisors in its network. The firm faced challenges articulating differentiated value to advisors and their clients while maintaining relevance in an evolving wealth management landscape, and existing marketing capabilities required enhancement.
Vivaldi developed an integrated marketing strategy addressing both advisor-facing and consumer-facing dimensions. Strategic analysis identified opportunities to clarify positioning, enhance tools for advisors, and strengthen brand communications, balancing immediate tactical needs with longer-term capability development.
Commonwealth received a comprehensive marketing strategy and implementation roadmap providing clear direction for positioning, messaging, and program development. Enhanced resources supported advisors' client acquisition and retention efforts.
Commonwealth Financial Network engaged Vivaldi to articulate differentiated value to independent advisors and their clients in an evolving wealth management landscape. Vivaldi developed an integrated marketing strategy that clarified positioning, enhanced advisor-facing tools, and strengthened brand communications, balancing immediate tactical needs with longer-term capability development and providing a roadmap that supported advisors’ client acquisition and retention efforts.
Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer and registered investment adviser headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. The firm supports independent financial advisors across the United States with technology, research, and practice management services, and is one of the larger privately held independent broker-dealers in the US wealth management industry.
Vivaldi delivered an integrated marketing strategy and implementation roadmap that gave Commonwealth clear direction on positioning, messaging, and program development, and that strengthened the resources advisors use to acquire and retain clients. The work covered both advisor-facing and consumer-facing dimensions rather than treating them as separate problems.
The strategy was built on the recognition that an independent broker-dealer’s brand has two distinct audiences with intersecting needs, advisors who choose the platform and end clients who experience it through their advisor. Vivaldi defined the positioning and capability investments that worked for both, which meant the consumer-facing communications reinforced the advisor’s value proposition rather than competing with it.
Independent broker-dealers sit behind the advisor in the end client’s awareness, which makes the brand’s strategic job partly invisible to the people whose money is on the platform. The positioning has to win the advisor’s choice on substantive grounds like technology, research, and practice management while also being expressible to clients in a way that makes them feel chosen rather than incidental, and those two registers often pull in different directions.
The transferable lesson is that a platform serving independent advisors cannot run advisor marketing and consumer marketing as separate functions with separate strategies. The roadmap that worked for Commonwealth integrated the two so that every capability investment served both audiences, which is the only way to keep the platform’s brand consistent through the relationships the advisor mediates.