GUESS WHO’S PUTTING ITS JOHN HANCOCK ON A BIG-BUCKS BRANDING CAMPAIGN? WE’RE TALKING FUNDS, NOT THE BIG INSURER

John Hancock Funds wants to be heard.

The group, which is based in Boston and manages $34 billion, is rolling out an aggressive advertising campaign aimed at distinguishing itself from its parent company, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance. It is also getting ready to send 19 of its 38 portfolio managers on a national road show with the hope of creating something of a buzz about funds beyond its two top-selling offerings.

Bill Benintende, a vice president in charge of marketing at Hancock, declined to comment on the cost of the campaign other than to say it is in the “low seven figures.”

The print campaign, which got under way early this month and is slated to run though the end of the year, is aimed at brokers and financial advisers. Ads will appear in such trade publications as Dow Jones Investment Advisor, InvestmentNews, On Wall Street, and Research.

“It’s a completely targeted campaign,” says a spokeswoman for the company, which sell its funds through intermediaries. “It’s not a fund-specific campaign. It’s a branding campaign.”

One ad depicts an empty green meadow with a cocktail napkin laid over it. On the napkin is a hand-sketched home — signifying an investor’s dream house. “People don’t dream about returns,” the ad reads. “They dream about the rewards of those returns — like a place they can really call their own.”

three four-page ads

There are three ads in the campaign. Each is four pages long and contains a fund reference list that brokers and advisers can pull out and save.

But Hancock faces some pretty heady competition in its bid to brand its subsidiary, which is the nation’s 26th-largest mutual fund complex in terms of assets.

The rush to gain market share in the rapidly maturing fund business has sent many formidable competitors scurrying down the same path. Just last week, Fidelity — the world’s largest fund operation — launched a multimillion-dollar branding campaign with Peter S. Lynch, the former Magellan fund manager who is widely considered one of the world’s greatest stock pickers.

Other fund groups outspending Hancock to position themselves as brands include OppenheimerFunds Inc., T. Rowe Price Associates and MFS Investment Services.

Hancock is also likely to find that a one-time advertising campaign won’t increase brand awareness very much.

“Everybody is jumping on the ‘brandwagon’ right now,” says Dan Ross, president of Wechsler Ross & Partners, a New York marketing agency that specializes in financial services branding, “There has been a mad rush by many companies to advertising as a cure-all for their lack of a defined brand image, and one-time ad campaigns are not a solution to that problem.”

Mr. Benintende concedes that the campaign won’t make Hancock’s funds as ubiquitous as Nike or McDonald’s. “I don’t think every broker, or every household, in America is going to know what we do at the end of four months,” he says. “But it’s a first step.”

Getting investors to know what Hancock does is also at the heart of the firm’s upcoming portfolio manager roadshow. The month-long odyssey, which gets under way Sept. 21, will take the managers to brokers in 31 cities across the nation. While the managers are expected to talk about their views on the market and the economy, Hancock ultimately hopes the road show will bring attention to its lesser-known funds.

Hancock is best known for two funds: the Regional Bank Fund, which has $5.6 billion in assets, and the Financial Industries Fund, with $3.3 billion in assets. Together, they accounted for 55.4% of the unit’s 1998 total sales through July.