A dark market means no advertising. No television, no print, often not even a sign at point of sale. Marketing normally works by telling people a product exists and giving them a reason to choose it. Take that away and the job becomes something else entirely — the pack itself carries the brand, since it may be the only thing a consumer ever sees. Trade relationships and distribution become the reach you cannot buy in media. Pricing architecture starts doing work a campaign would normally do. Underneath all of it, the category kept moving: plain packaging legislation, flavour bans, tax increases pushing volume into illicit trade, and a genuinely new product category — reduced-risk products, vaping, heated tobacco — needing marketing built for something with no established regulatory language yet, across twenty-three markets that were not aligned with each other on any of it.

A savings account is simple. A segregated fund, a structured investment, a variable annuity, a mortgage renewal are not — the thing being sold is a bundle of interest rate exposure, tax treatment, liquidity terms, and guarantees, and the customer-facing simplicity has to sit on top of mechanics that are genuinely complicated underneath. Marketing a product like that means understanding what the regulator requires, what the actuarial and capital constraints are, and what happens to the offer when rates move — before deciding what to say to a customer at all. That is what building the function across retail, commercial, wealth, and direct investing actually meant, through a pandemic and a full corporate rebrand, where the mechanics kept changing under the messaging.