Standing out from the crowd

Today’s frenzied, multi-media marketing environment poses a daunting challenge: How can advisers capture the attention of prospective clients and retain the attention of existing clients in order to deliver their message?

Despite their greater resources, asset managers face the same challenge. Whether trying to increase adviser awareness of their offerings or to educate advisers and investors, mutual fund firms from boutiques to giants find that cutting through the media cacophony and clutter is increasingly difficult. As a resource in their communication efforts, many fund companies have turned to the Mutual Fund Educational Alliance, an organization created more than four decades ago to help the investment management industry’s senior leaders serve and support advisers and investors.

Each year, MFEA recognizes excellence in fund communications and marketing through its STAR awards. This year, the awards honored programs in a broad array of categories ¬— website, mobile website, educational brochure, ad campaign, newsletter/magazine, introduction kit, marketing campaign and digital innovation, among others. And while each program was designed to meet the objectives of a specific asset manager, there is much that advisers can learn from the winners, especially lessons in how to create and execute marketing messages that resonate with prospects and clients.

The digital challenge

Consider the challenge of digital communication. Like everyone else, advisers’ clients are glued to their mobile devices and rely on them for an ever-greater share of their media consumption. So what should advisers be doing to meet their clients’ increasingly mobile digital needs? In that area, advisers can find direction from JP Morgan Asset Management, which won STAR awards in its asset-class category for digital innovation in adviser communications, retail communications and retirement communications.

The core element of the firm’s retirement communications winning efforts is a digital target-date fund comparison tool that allows advisers and the plan sponsors they serve to examine the universe of target-date funds in order to determine which may best serve the needs of plan participants.

“More than 40 fund companies offer target-date funds and advisers kept telling us that there was no easy way to compare them,” said Michael Miller, Managing Director and head of DCIS Adviser Sales at JP Morgan Asset Management.

The increasing popularity of target-date funds within retirement plans of all sizes brought to light the issue, Miller said. While target-date funds typically have similar names, their investment philosophies and approaches may differ greatly, even for funds with the same target date. For example, managers of one 2025 target-date fund may invest based on the assumption that investors will hold their funds past that date and spend down the fund throughout retirement, while another manager might assume that investors will exit the fund upon reaching 2025. Each approach affects how fund managers construct and manage their portfolios between now and then, with some managers holding a small percentage of equities at certain times in the life of their fund, for instance, while managers of other funds with the same target date hold a high percentage of equities.

Unbiased information

“Since every client is different, our belief was that if we could provide a digital tool that was purely educational and completely neutral and unbiased, we would be able to help advisers, plan sponsors and, ultimately, plan participants select the right funds based on their needs and specific attributes,” Miller said.

The educational approach is working. Advisers serving the retirement plan market have come to rely on the JP Morgan tool and use it regularly. Approximately 12,000 reports have been requested by advisers using the tool, said Miller, and almost 2,000 advisers serving the retirement market have used it.

“We wanted to stand out from the crowd, and our belief is that one of the best ways to do that over the long run is to provide an intellectual capital resource to the marketplace that is unbiased and that advisers can rely on to solve a problem that faces so many clients,” Miller said. “What we’ve provided is an engagement tool that successful advisers can use to differentiate themselves. The tool — along with the ancillary resources we make available — enables advisers to have robust conversations with plan sponsors about participant demographics and behaviors, as well as the funds that may be best suited to serve a plan’s specific needs. It helps advisers fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities and become a true resource to plan sponsors.”

While most advisers don’t have the resources to build their own digital tools, using objective diagnostic and assessment tools, whether from third parties or from investment management companies including JP Morgan Asset Management, for instance, can be equally effective. The key to their effectiveness, as the STAR award winners will confirm, is that the tools — whether digital, print, video or anything else — be educational, helpful and not a thinly veiled sales message. As STAR award-winning Ariel Investments’ Merrillyn Kosier says, “It’s not about you, it’s about them.”

Thinking big

As a small firm with a marketing budget far more limited than those of its giant rivals, Ariel Investments carefully thought through a marketing communications strategy that would enable it to stand out from the crowd — an exercise that advisers would do well to emulate.

“We decided that we must be clear and concise, and that everything we communicate — our messages, our ‘look’ and our tone — must be in our unique voice,” said Kosier, an Executive Vice President of the firm, which is a value, deep value and global manager. “People are bombarded by communications these days, so to stand out your message has to be crisp, clear and easy to navigate. At Ariel, we want to connect information and help people understand what it all means to them and make clear why they should care, not just pump out more information.”

From her own firm’s market research, the extensive analysis of data it collects on its marketing communications activities and from what she’s learned from her peers through MFEA, Kosier says that what investors demand today is truth.

“They want investment products that deliver on what’s promised,” she says. “Trust is essential.”

Based in Chicago, Ariel Investments’ marketing approach seems to have taken a leaf from the city’s adopted architecture lion Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who famously said, “Less is more.” Where the firm once had specific web sites for advisers and institutions, Ariel now combines everything on one site that addresses everyone’s needs in one voice.

A unique voice

“In whatever we do in the way of communication, we always ask ourselves it it’s unique. If you took what we had created and covered up our name, could the printed piece or the online content just as easily have come from another asset manager? Would the message be any different from anyone else’s message? Would the look be indistinguishable from someone else’s? Those are the questions we ask ourselves all the time,” Kosier said, “and if we can’t honestly say that what we’ve produced is unique, we go back to the drawing board.”

Advisers crafting their own messages to prospects and clients should be asking themselves similar questions. In today’s marketplace, advisers must make their unique marketing message crystal clear across all media. They must also be perceived as being a provider of useful, factual and unbiased information that can help clients and prospects address real issues in their lives. Those are the key lessons of the STAR award winners.