Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) marketing professor Gaurav Jain, Ph.D., has published Money, Marketed: A Primer on the Marketing of Financial Products, addressing what he calls "a persistent gap between people who deeply understand finance and people who deeply understand marketing." 

The book arrives at a time when financial services firms increasingly recognize that product performance alone doesn't necessarily attract capital, yet few resources exist to help marketers navigate the complexity of regulated financial products, or to help finance professionals communicate effectively with investors. 

“In my academic work and in years of advising financial firms, I have consistently seen finance professionals struggle with marketing, and marketing professionals struggle with the realities of financial products and regulation,” Jain says. “This book is an effort to fill that gap by bringing together finance, marketing, regulation, and investor psychology into a single, coherent framework grounded in both research and practice.” 

Money, Marketed synthesizes behavioral finance, brand strategy, compliance thinking, and narrative architecture into a practical framework. The book argues that marketing financial products requires fundamentally different approaches than marketing consumer goods, and that even within finance, effective marketing varies dramatically across product categories. 

"Marketing an ETF is fundamentally different from marketing a credit card, a private fund, or a fractionalized asset," Jain explains. "Financial products cannot be treated as a single category and must be understood in their specific economic, regulatory, and behavioral contexts." 

Jain, who holds a Ph.D. in marketing and conducts research on investor decision-making, has spent his career advising fintechs, registered investment advisors, asset managers, and private market platforms. He currently serves as the Director of Graduate (M.S.) Programs at RPI’s Lally School of Management. 

Each chapter in the book addresses specific challenges, including product classification, investor psychology, cross-market marketing, compliance-aware design, and the role of AI in financial campaigns. The book also examines how private market platforms can lead with education rather than hype, and how trust can be built into global expansion strategies. 

To keep the content grounded in industry reality, Jain includes contributions from senior practitioners across major financial institutions. "I brought in external collaborators who are seasoned professionals to ensure the book remains anchored in practice, not just theory," he says. “As a group, they are seasoned professionals who have spent decades working across major financial institutions and product categories.” 

The book is designed for professionals in financial services, asset management, and fintech, as well as marketers working in regulated industries. It also serves students seeking to enter finance with a marketing mindset, or marketing with a finance mindset — a hybrid skill set in high demand but with limited structured guidance available. 

"If there's one message I hope this book conveys, it's that marketing financial products isn't just about performance," Jain writes. "It's about understanding people. Their hopes, their fears, their behaviors, and the systems they interact with."