I'm about to use a dirty word in this column, so if you are squeamish or have small children in the room, you might want to turn the page to a more family-oriented part of the magazine. For the rest of you, I'm going to try to figure out what I can get past Financial Planning's censors.

The subject is m*rk*ting, an activity many of you believe is beneath your professional dignity and rather unpleasant to discuss in mixed com-pany. One of my favorite lines came from Roy Diliberto, who practices in Philadelphia. When asked how he m*rk*ts his services, he said: "I wait for my phone to ring." When asked what he did when business was slow, he said: "I wait harder."

TALKING TO THE CONSUMER

There is solid evidence that Diliberto's m*rk*ting plan is not unique. More than a year ago, I invited the members of my Inside Information community to enter a contest for the best m*rk*ting materials. To judge this event, I brought in Brigid O'Connor, former director of m*rk*ting for the Financial Planning Association, who is one of our better conference speakers on this nasty subject. She applied various criteria to select the winner: The com-pany brochure had to be attractive (she called it "the eye-candy quotient") and the materials had to be designed with a consistent message, graphics and colors. The winning brochure also had to be intriguing enough to pass her "open test"--which means, basically, does the cover make me interested enough to look inside?

Despite a high number of submissions, and tens of thousands of dollars obviously spent on form and message, not one of the m*rk*ting packages met her final criterion: that the message be client-focused rather than what she calls "we-focused."

All of the marketing packages were basically saying: We offer tax planning; we have these credentials; we are one of the leading firms. "As the consumer, I want the focus of what I'm reading to be on me, not on the planner or the planning firm," says O'Connor. "I understand that a sales piece has to speak about the service provider. But it ought to do that within the context of what's in it for the client."

Based on this sample, and on more extensive work by Andrew Gluck at Advisor Products, it seems clear that the planning community suffers from a unique dysfunction in the business marketplace. "The most basic advice in m*rk*ting," says O'Connor, "is to talk about benefits, not features." In other arenas, this is so common that you don't even notice it. An ad for an expensive wristwatch doesn't talk about how the mechanism works be-hind the dial; the message is all about how it looks and how reliable it is. A restaurant doesn't tout the ingredients that go into different meals; it offers tasty food and a pleasant atmosphere.

WHAT DOES PLANNING OFFER?

We realized that independent advisers are simply not communicating the benefits of financial planning to their prospects and clients. In fact, they may not yet have articulated those benefits clearly to themselves, much less come to a profession-wide consensus on what they are. We asked advisers for their best ideas on how to communicate this value, and got hundreds of good, creative responses, the best of which I later collected into a document called "The M*rk*ting Template."

Some of the suggestions take us closer to defining those elusive benefits:

• "Financial planning is helping you prioritize your scarce resources (time and money) to meet your personal and future lifestyle."
• "We foster your personal and financial success."
• "We offer freedom, peace of mind and a trustworthy relationship."

To give credit where it's due, about the same time that we were doing this study, Gluck at Advisor Products was offering the same message about adviser websites that he was reviewing: Virtually all of them were much too "we"-oriented.

More recently, his firm brought in Howard Gendel, who conducts focus groups for large financial services firms such as Merrill Lynch, to discover the optimal way to communicate through a brochure. "He showed people brochures from different financial services companies," says Gluck. "We asked them what they were likely to read, and more importantly, what they were not going to read."

"SKIM FRIENDLY" BROCHURES

One insight: The typical 812- by 11-inch tri-fold brochure, known as the "Slim Jim" in the m*rk*ting trade, was not taken seriously. For some reason, the small size suggested that the planning firm itself was small or insignificant. People are far more likely to pick up a four-page document and browse it. Another insight was that no consumer picks up a brochure to read the text; the best you can hope for is that they'll skim it. They're not likely to read paragraphs of text, but they might read bullet points.