Simply put, investment brands are different—from their products and services to their diverse audiences—and they operate by a different set of brand rules. Let’s look at a few unique challenges that these brands face.
How do you brand thinking, advice, and insight—all intangibles?
With consumer goods or manufacturing for example, customers can experience a product—they can taste it, wear it, or take it for a drive. With an intangible-based brand like asset management, the proposition rests largely on the thinking, insight and expertise of the manager.
As a result, brand building in asset management requires identifying and cultivating a positioning that conveys value and captures the essence of those intangibles in a way that feels credible, differentiated, and durable.
How do you build an authentic brand experience when your audience is layered—sometimes its B2C, sometimes its B2B, sometimes it’s both?
Investment management brands are neither consumer brands nor B2B brands, they’re different. Their primary audiences are a mix of professional buyers—financial advisors, sub-advisory clients, plan sponsors, consultants—and individual investors with very different needs and expectations. On one hand they must be perceived as offering deep insight and information while on the other they need to instill a sense of trust and confidence with end investors. Adding to the challenge, is that all of this needs to be conveyed through a complex distribution system.
Deep knowledge of the markets and investment products, along with a strong understanding of the nuances of various distribution channels, is essential to shaping relevant propositions and communications.
Developing an effective investment management brand therefore requires not only industry knowledge, but disciplined brand-building expertise.
How do you build an investment brand when what investors are expecting is that their assets will grow and outperform?
Clients are ultimately expecting that assets will grow based on the management’s ‘intangible expertise and insight’. However, unless they have yet benefited from that expertise, what they are being asked to believe is based on past performance and information. The problem is that the future is uncertain, there are no guarantees, and history doesn’t always repeat itself.
Therefore, clients need reasons other than history to believe that a firm will deliver.
Clients need reasons other than history to believe—particularly in a market where access to information and comparable performance data is assumed rather than exceptional. Ultimately, it comes down to trust.
That emphasis on trust is reflected in allocator and advisor research: ISS Market Intelligence has found that trust and confidence consistently rank among the most important factors influencing manager selection, alongside performance.
Crafting a brand of reliability, openness and confidence are keys to gaining that trust—we offer five keys on how to do this below.
- Identify a core, unifying brand positioning. One that embodies the purpose of the brand and the ultimate benefits to all that it engages. Get to the essence of the firm, who it is, what it believes, how it’s better or different than others and tell a credible, compelling story.
- Understand what each target audience needs to hear to engage. Spend time developing a messaging strategy that communicates effectively to each audience, builds brand equity and communicates the distinct benefits of each strategy or product.
- Tell a meaningful and differentiated story. For years, asset management firms stayed in a very narrow range of brand building with lackluster messages focused largely on people, process and performance.
A strong brand tells a clearer, more differentiated story—one grounded in insight and purpose. - Be consistent in all communications and behaviors. Set the messaging strategy and ensure it is followed. Absent a strategy the brand storytelling is often told from the perspective of the teller and may be inconsistent or narrow—ultimately diluting brand awareness and appreciation.
- Invest in building the brand. For a time, with good performance and generally content investors many firms believed that was enough for its brand reputation. But the game has changed and now clients are looking for reasons to believe beyond performance.
Investing in a powerful, differentiated asset management brand is now a strategic imperative.
Source: Broadridge Fund Brand 50
Leading asset management firms recognized in the Fund Brand 50 are differentiated less by performance alone and more by trust, clarity, and brand credibility.
Source: Broadridge Fund Brand 50
In closing, building a strong and enduring brand in the investment management business is both an art and a science. The pursuit involves two essential pieces; understanding the true and authentic identity of a firm to create powerful differentiation and having a deep understanding of key audiences to unlock what they need to hear to engage. From this foundation, strong brands can grow.
Sources
- ISS Market Intelligence – Advisor & allocator research on manager selection drivers
- Broadridge Fund Brand 50 – Industry benchmarking of fund brand trust and credibility