Arimathea Investing

Helping a faith-based asset management startup build a distinctive brand so they can get attention and break into a high-compete industry with confidence.

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Client

Arimathea Investing

industries

services

The problem: in a $100T industry, you look like everyone else.

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When Arimathea Investing approached Sherwood Fellows, they had a real problem.

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They were entering one of the most competitive, high-stakes industries in the world: asset management. Their initial branding was what you'd expect from a values-driven asset management startup. What you’re supposed to do.

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They were trying to get traction with a brand and messaging like everyone else’s.

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A few aspirational statements about money and morals; visual identity that reassured you, "We’re trustworthy institutional professionals;" everything that gave the impression, "I'm like your 67-year-old dad's Edward Jones guy, only my religious values are a little more apparent."

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Trustworthy. Institutional. Sober. Professional.

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About as compelling as finding a grain of sand in a desert.

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Every industry has a “normal brand” in their category.

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What do all finance brands have in common? For one, they’re all blue or green. There isn’t a hint of another color in Schwab, Chase, Fidelity, Deutsche Bank, US Bank, Goldman Sachs, or Barclays. They all say more or less the same thing: “The Market is Yours.”; “Banking is our craft.”; “The planning effect.”

Sports brands all use big thick condensed fonts and say “Be all you can be.”

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Tech brands always use the same sans-serif fonts and blue gradients.

Gin brands are always esoteric. Lots of floral colors and “an unusual gin for the unusual drinker.”

When you’re a startup, the very last thing that you want to do is follow suit with your category norm. Yet you want to be taken seriously… so you end up following suit anyway.

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Unfortunately for you, startups have precious little leverage. When you enter a new category, you are competing against established brands (however indistinctive) with up to 1000x the budget that you have, existing customer bases, great talent, etc.

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If you try to win at their game, you will lose it. So you need to ask the question, “What can I do that the big players can’t?"

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Difference without distinctiveness makes you invisible

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You can do everything that the endless gauntlet of compliance officers, yes-men, and stakeholder meetings won’t let them. In other words, take risks with your product or marketing.

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Your only leverage against big dogs is the following:

New value. Your product offer does something extraordinarily different from your competitors. In marketing we call this “Difference.”
A brand that is so surprising that it is unforgettable. We call this “Distinctiveness.”

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Luckily, Arimathea was already different. Arimathea Investing was founded to help financial advisors and their clients invest in accordance with their morals. The team knows their industry inside out — the good, the bad, and the ugly. They have a clear vision and the know-how to improve conscientious investing beyond ESG buzzwords. As with any asset manager, returns are their primary concern, but not without highly vetted, circumspect investments that align with their values.

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But here's the problem with differentiation alone: it can be copied. Your bigger competitors can eventually replicate your features, match your claims, or blur your positioning with their marketing budgets. Those very same ESG buzzwords already make other asset managers seem like they do what Arimathea does, even if they don’t.

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And even if nobody copies your difference, you might not even be noticed among all the hustlers in a jam-packed industry..

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A distinctive brand: your unfair competitive advantage

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“A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly.”

— Peter Thiel, Zero to One

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If you need to make every dollar go further, you need to leverage these two elements — difference and distinctiveness — in tandem. If you don’t want to be immediately copied or drowned out, you need something your bigger competitors are structurally unable to copy: though they might eventually be able to compete with your difference, they cannot compete with your distinctive brand. You will have already captured the reputation for your difference (“claim a monopoly,” as Thiel puts it), and their legions of bureaucracy won’t let them take the risks you can fast enough to make them count.

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You must turn your differentiation into a distinctive brand so that everyone automatically associates that difference with your brand and makes it unforgettable.

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That’s exactly what Sherwood Fellows did for Arimathea Investing.

Phase 1: Traction for the vision

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Since Arimathea was in a hurry to capture their piece of the asset management world, we started out with a lo-fi website, more outspoken messaging, and some brand aesthetics that helped them get up and running in just a few weeks.

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This initial iteration was intentionally provocative, too forceful and uncharacteristically brash to work in the asset management industry long-term. But it broke the ice. Arimathea’s unorthodox look and messaging turned heads.

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It worked. Over the next several months, they started to get traction.

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Phase II: Distinctiveness built to last

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Once Arimathea began to experience some lift, we worked with them to evolve their initial, unorthodox brand into something more professional and timeless but just as distinctive.

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Messaging changed only slightly to focus more on how Arimathea’s difference applies to their industry. The brand look got some even more evocative colors and doubled down on the use of historical etchings as visual elements.

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Arimathea’s re-branding process with Sherwood Fellows took them from “values-based asset manager” to “the leading firm for faith-based investing: credible professionals boldly stating their convictions and backing them up with thought leadership in conscientious asset management, unmatched due-diligence in vetting investments, and the go-to accreditor for advisors who align with their principles.”

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They were already different, and now they are distinctive enough to be noticed.

Social Media Growth:

+500.4% LinkedIn impressions
+14.64% in quality LinkedIn engagement, signalling audience
+58.4% overall engagement rate on Linkedin
+80.6% followers on LinkedIn
Established presence on Instagram & Facebook

The Lesson: “You can’t save souls in an empty church”

Remember, your only levers against entrenched players are difference and distinctiveness. Your difference might be the salvation of your customers, but unless you preach it with a distinctive brand, they won’t come to be saved in the first place.

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Of course Arimathea’s team was apprehensive about a unique brand at first. There is such a thing as too far when you are attempting to become distinctive. You can be distinctive in the wrong ways.

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Most brands err too far on the side of caution and thereby give up distinctiveness totally.

You can’t be distinctive without resistance. You have to say, “This is who WE are,” and by necessity, “This is who we are NOT.”

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When the big firm’s compliance officer says, “Some people won’t like this,” and rushes the brand somewhere safer, they dull the cutting edge of their brand. “Corporate citizens” don’t like to be adversarial, but let’s be honest — nobody likes someone who gets along with everyone. They want someone who has similar principles and stands on them.

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This is what adds the drama to your brand that makes everyone pay attention. This is what your early-stage company can do that big players can’t… and you can do it faster to get your market share before they see you coming.

If you’re willing to turn your difference into a distinctive brand that makes a bold statement about who you are, your brand will turn heads.

You might have the greatest differentiation in the world, but if you can’t communicate it in a compelling way, you won’t get attention.

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As David Ogilvy said, “You can’t save souls in an empty Church.”

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Getting traction for your company means making converts, and nobody wants to be part of a half-hearted thing.

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Arimathea is out to make converts: financial advisors who share their values, investors who want more diligence about where their money is going, and thought leadership to call investing to a higher standard.

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Their distinctive brand is doing the preaching.

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