The Most Expensive Slide in Any Brand Deck Is the One Nobody Challenges

That slide is expensive precisely because it looks free. It costs nothing to print and everything to live with, because it quietly instructs every decision downstream of it to be exactly as forgettable as your competitors’.

Here is the uncomfortable mirror. Havas has measured brand “meaningfulness” since 2008, across hundreds of thousands of consumers, and one finding has held for over a decade: roughly three-quarters of brands could disappear overnight and people wouldn’t care — they’d simply find a replacement. “Trust, innovation, excellence” is what a brand says on its way into that three-quarters.

For financial and professional services, this should be alarming and motivating in equal measure. Havas’s 2024 B2B study found the pattern inverts in B2B: professionals said they would miss 81 percent of B2B brands if they vanished. Brand carries more weight in B2B, not less — which means distinctiveness is a larger lever for you, not a smaller one. The generic-values slide isn’t a harmless placeholder. It is you opting out of your single biggest available advantage.

Why nobody challenges it

Because challenging it feels like an attack on the strategy, and on the people who signed off on it. It is safer to nod. So the slide survives every review, and its genericness propagates — into the brief, the headlines, the sales deck, the website. The slide is not the disease. It is the most visible symptom of an organization that resolves creative disagreement by retreating to words no one could possibly object to, and no one will ever remember.

Values that no competitor could disagree with aren’t values. They’re wallpaper.

How to make it cost less

The test is simple and a little ruthless: would a direct competitor put the opposite on their slide? No rival will ever claim they stand for distrust, stagnation, and mediocrity — which means “trust, innovation, excellence” tells your market nothing. Distinctiveness is the only line on that slide worth paying for.

Fixing it is not a wording exercise; it is a decision-making one. It takes someone with the craft to know the difference between distinctive and merely safe, and the authority to make challenging that slide a normal part of how the organization works — rather than an act of insubordination. That is the unglamorous core of creative operations, and it is exactly what an embedded creative leader exists to do: make the expensive, unchallenged slide challengeable again.