Today's episode will focus on how marketing is a function and as part of the business can drive growth within investment organisations.

I'm joined by two guests today.

My first guest is Andrew Kelly, a native New Zealander who spent many years working at Aberdeen Asset Management in a variety of roles.

Today's episode will focus on how marketing as a function and as part of the business can drive growth within investment organizations. I'm joined by two guests today. My first guest is Andrew Kelly, a native New Zealander who spent many years working at Aberdeen Asset Management in a variety of roles. And I'm also joined by Adi Johnson, who's at Standard Life when Aberdeen and Standard Life merged.

And they jointly became co CMO of Aberdeen Standard Investments.

Andrew is now at Collard Capital as head of marketing, and Andy is a non executive chair at River and Mercantile. Thank you both for joining me. I'm I'm really interested in the role that marketing plays within the the the growth strategy of our investment management firms. Andy?

Yeah. No. Delighted to be here, David, and thanks for having us. Yeah. I mean, I think it plays a key role in in terms of any growth strategy of any investment management organization.

I don't think it's always necessarily obvious to all the key stakeholders within those organizations about the importance that the marketing function in general actually has. But I certainly think in my experience, a lot of the activity which is undertaken by the marketing function is very supportive of the broader distribution effort. Now there are certain things that I think generally are required. You have to have performance, you have to have product and a variety of different capabilities.

But underlying that, how you get your message to market and professional fund buyers or retail investors depending on the segment, is in large part supported by the marketing activity, particularly how you differentiate in a really crowded market where there's literally thousands of different capabilities out there. So so I think it is kind of, yeah, the crux of a lot of activity, but my own personal view is that I think sometimes it's not fully recognized within the organizations about the importance of the function necessarily takes.

Yeah. I mean, I would I would echo all those points. It's becoming increasingly important for firms to differentiate and tell their story to the end customer. In the past, this this industry has focused a lot on b to b to c or just b to b, but now it's becoming a bit more down the the b to c route. So telling your story clearly, in a well differentiated, articulated way is is crucial.

Why do you think that is, that it's not fully recognized by other the the sort of key stakeholders within the with within firms, maybe at the c suite level?

Well, I think this industry is a technical industry, and it's it's typically led by analytical people who who base decisions on on data, and marketing has always struggled to to define its ROI. And so I think there's a a lack of understanding about that that return on investment. I mean, we are in the investment game, and I think a lot of the c suite who who direct the businesses without that appreciation, they they struggle to, I guess, buy into it sometimes. That's changing for sure.

I think leadership of of certainly the businesses that I've worked in has has had a much greater appreciation for marketing and and that it's a sustained investment in the business.

Yeah. I I completely agree with Andrew there. We we were very lucky to sort of we work within the sort of distribution function and certainly the guy that headed up when we were there completely got in a massive supporter of us. There were other parts of the business, I I think, within sort of finance functions that just maybe didn't have an appreciation of the marketing activity.

So I remember quite vividly having some conversations, really looking for giving me a direct correlation, as Andrew was saying, between the amount of money you spent on that particular bit of marketing activity and money coming in the door. In a complex industry with lots of different dynamics, it's just really, really difficult to actually to achieve that. And either you get it or you don't. The way that I remember finance categorized things.

Everything was advertising. So you had websites in every different market. You had a social strategy. You had your digital capabilities.

You had this whole range of supporting capabilities. But for whatever reason, finance had categorized this as advertising.

And they thought that we had this, you know, Andrew and I had this monumental budget that we were kind of spending on advertising, which just wasn't factually accurate. So, I mean, the lesson for me there was really trying to work hard with those analytical types of individuals so they can understand these are the capabilities that we have, and this is how the attribution And this is how we measure it.

You know? It's not necessarily about fund flow. It's about engagement and repeat, you know, repeat visitors and all sorts of other things. We've spent a lot of work moving from generalist marketing to to specialist in in modern marketing. So having specialisms within the team, people who live and breathe a certain type of marketing, whether it's digital or creating great content.

You still need the generalists who are perhaps out there in the field and have the relationships with the the local press community.

They know their competitor set, and then they leverage the the specialists to execute. I think the industry in general has been quite slow to catch up with other industries and other sectors in the use of modern marketing capabilities. And I cannot think of this time of year when it's coming up to tax year end in the UK with ISIS and, you know, pension deadlines. And it's the same, you know, quarter page article in the Sunday Times and, you know, that might be an effective kind of route for some organizations, but I think there's certain organizations that are still using fairly standard, you know, marketing engagement mechanisms from a number of years ago. Maybe it's part of their mix.

But I think that the discipline has moved on as a much, much more scientific discipline than it was many, many years ago, but I suspect that others haven't quite necessarily caught up with the multidisciplinary nature of what a marketing function necessarily does yet.

I think that coloring department, Monk here, is is yeah. It's I I think it's still very much there in in this industry, but if you look across to other part other industries, you know, the marketing team tends to lead strategy, and it's it's a it's a bit of an inverse relationship, And I think that's just, you know, lots of businesses are still investment led, and that will continue for a while.

What what do you think needs to happen within within the financial services sector to to make that change? Probably more open mindedness from some of the the kind of analytical type of organization.

And if you've not been exposed to something, you don't know the power of the the capability.

You may not have an appreciation of what it can actually do for you.

And I think that's just gonna take a bit of time, but you're seeing some of the organizations out there that are doing it really effectively. So if you look at some of the stuff, think that Schroders do is fantastic. Some of the blue chip brands are doing, you know, fantastic job and others less so, but it's take a bit of time to catch up. Right?

And I guess the other big piece is just this idea of longevity. People are living longer, and we don't have enough workers to to fund those who have retired. So that essentially means that pension systems around the world will struggle to support people in retirement. So now you're seeing lots of the big managers, really look at that end customer and and build out, products and solutions that support them. So your traditional sales forces, face to face sales are just you know, that's no longer fit for purpose. So the only way to reach them is through through good digital marketing and having a digital presence that communicates to them the way that they like to be communicated with simple messages to build up that that brand understanding so, you know, they'll they'll do business with you in the future. So you sort of it's it's inevitable that this will happen.

That's a big challenge, isn't it? Because not only do the organizations need to speak to more people, but they also need to hold that relationship for a much longer period of time. What are some of the other challenges that you you you you think that the organizations face when it comes to achieving growth through marketing? Andy?

Historically, I think a lot of the content that's been produced is very much directed at professional buyers, which is still obviously be very important today.

And there's been a lack of appreciation of what your average end consumer needs to understand or is actually even probably interested in. So if you start chatting and speaking in investment garbage to an average Joe, then the chances are they're not necessarily going to engage with that kind of content messaging. Now within retail customers, I think there's also probably a tendency to to assume that all retail consumers are are the same, and it's a a non homogenous bunch. So you ranges from very sophisticated switched on individuals who've got a very good understanding of what their investment needs are to a whole bunch of people that don't even when they invest in a pension, in a workplace scheme, for example, they don't even necessarily know they're invested in the stock market.

So I don't think there's one size fits all in this. So a recognition that there are these changes going on, the types of engagement and messaging and content that is relevant to different segments of those consumer base.

You know, these things, again, take time, and they need long term commitment. So year on year investment and things like content and brand are are mandatory. You know, marketing sometimes is the level up on a on a p and l to to get you through the year.

I I think it's a good point actually, Andrew, because I think that's really important to know. So it's been difficult market conditions over the last twelve months or so. I think the risk is, and I've seen this all too often, is that when there's a difficult market environment, the easy thing to do is to reduce your spend on on your brand.

And therefore, it is this mindset of, again, show me empirically what the the the bottom line is in your ROI in this particular campaign as opposed to taking a a more holistic long term view around about the fact that brand resonance and sustained investment in brand is gonna be a key differentiator for the future.

There's a lot of evidence that the IPA institution practitioner for advertising publish around the the brands that sustain marketing spend during during downturns compared to the ones that cut back, and the speed that they come come out of recoveries. It's a it it makes for for very interesting reading, especially if you are under pressure for for for budgets. It's kind of ironic that in a in an industry which preaches the need to stick in for the long term that we're even having this discussion, really, but there we are.

What what do you think are the are the challenges that that senior marketers face when developing their marketing strategies for for the business to to make sure that they're actually aligned to the overall corporate strategy, Andrew?

Being super coherent and clear with what you're trying to do at a thematic level and then working out how to to tell more of a tactical message around the products and the territories that you're in. That way you can get much more mileage because you get a a global campaign if you like that's fairly esoteric but has an interesting, you know, an interesting angle. And then down at the product level well, sorry, the the the country level, you can actually spotlight the products that, you know, have a high propensity to sell or are more more en vogue in in that territory. So there's a, yeah, there's a bit of a tension that you've just gotta manage. You really need great stakeholder engagement with the heads of distribution, the heads of geographies, etcetera, to to make that all hang together.

Essentially, distribution teams, they wanna go out there and sell, and they they have a, you know, they have a certain set of clients, some which are larger than others, and they want to hold those relationships and sometimes feel that the the the marketing doesn't necessarily support them in in in holding on to those those key stakeholder relationships. How have you navigated that or or joined the dots between the marketing teams and distribution teams to make each side understand the value that each other brings?

Well, this is that's an age old an age old question and problem with sales and marketing, I guess.

When it boil when you, you know, when you boil it down, clients shouldn't be owned by an individual. They're owned by the firm, and so you should, you know, you you should be basing your decisions on that client based on what makes sense from from a firm perspective. It's not Joe Salesman's job to own own the client. That's obviously at odds with what lots of other people think, but we always sort of, you know, talked about it being a a client relationship at a firm level course.

Because people can leave.

Yeah. Absolutely.

But I think to that closeness of working at all different levels, so, you know, at senior management level, at, you know, regional level, right down to marketing practitioners working in conjunction with individual sales teams. I think when that happened, then there was a far broader appreciation of the relative strengths of the sales function in the eyes of the marketeers and conversely in the eyes of the salespeople in terms of what the marketeers were actually doing to to support them. So that kind of coming together, the the shared agenda, and also it's it's quite a powerful function because there's nothing worse than having to face off to, I don't know, how many different heads of desks, each wanting their own capability sold when you've know fine well there's no market demand for that strategy at a given period of time.

If you've got the collective way of a combined sales and marketing effort and unit going out to have those conversations, you're a much more powerful position to to influence the business.

It's a bit of a barrier to entry, to be honest, for marketers in the industry because you need that that credibility. It's a technical subject. Investment management is is a very technical subject, so you need we need to attract the right talent to come in who are intellectually intellectually curious about, you know, investment products and, you know, take an interest in the macro economy and interest rates and how how investments work, really.

And you don't always get that with with, you know, with people in the industry and and and marketing teams, but having that credibility with, you know, the the people you're facing off to internally is is something that we always push for.

That that brings an interesting point as well about the actual the individuals that are working as part of the marketing teams. Do you think there is enough training within the industry? Is there enough caliber of new talent coming through within marketing teams compared to other sectors?

I don't know, to be honest. I think, you know, we've worked with some great people and some not so great people.

As marketing's become more specialized, you probably want them you want your aces to be great marketing people first and foremost, but have the ability to stretch into and as I say, be be genuinely curious about learning the product. Yeah.

Because without really understanding the product, you won't be able to to show your skills off.

And in your in your own time at Aberdeen, were you training your teams and putting them through training both within marketing as well as the technical product side of the business?

I think, generally, there was less training on the specific investment side of things. You'd pick that up through conversations with fund managers the job. Just on the job. Right?

So you're you're working with kind of technical minded individuals. I think where there was more specific training was around about some of the new disciplines that were coming through. So, you know, what are you doing in terms of your digital capabilities? How are you leveraging your social platform?

How are you leveraging your martech to to ensure that you're having much more impact. And I think where the the challenge comes back was for some of the marketeers, and I can hold myself culpable in this, articulating what some of those capabilities were able to do. The amount of data points that we were actually collecting was actually really quite significant.

That takes a sustained investment to understand what the analysis and the data points are actually telling you. And I don't think that we were probably yet mature enough to I I said at the time, it's probably moved on since since I left. But really articulating and utilizing the data points that were actually being provided to ensure that actually your marketing was actually more tailored. You had a better understanding round about the specific content that was actually landing.

And there was probably a more sophisticated way we could have utilized the data and insight that was actually coming up to inform future activity and then also bring the other parts of the organization that were nontechnical marketers doing this. And it struck me what what David and I had a previous conversation around about something that you guys do in in terms of marketing, the marketing audit, a digital audit. And even that stuff is fascinating just going through your your content estate. And if you can imagine an organization like Aberdeen and Standard Life when they came together, just so much content.

Yep.

And you just know that some of it's not being utilized.

Most of it, probably.

And so having the ability to really kinda use that analysis, you've got some empirical evidence to to go back, particularly in a very numerous industry, I think, was something that is actually probably very helpful.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's something that's always struck me. It's not that that and and organization large organizations are not not just within the industry that we're talking about.

Internal teams are are tasked with creating so much stuff. They don't often just get the chance to actually look at it and and check to see if it's actually working. So it's it's taking that time to actually see what works, what can be what can be done better, you know, oftentimes, you can you can we you know, we've worked with companies that that you can actually do less, but, actually, if you just focus on doing better Yeah.

You you get better, better results.

Content is yeah. It's a it's obviously the backbone of of marketing, and we you know, I totally agree with your less but better mantra.

I think getting content creators to think about the actual creation as being half of the job. The second half is how's it amplified? How's it actually piped out? How's it watched, read, heard? Yeah. And that's a completely different discipline to someone whose whose job it is to to write, to to create content.

Typically, in in the investment industry, it's technical content. So it's people who are ex investors themselves or people who who really dial up that left hand brain. You sort of need the right hand brain to pair it with to to get the most mileage.

I I to me, that's a very exciting part of marketing, and as you as you're starting to gain more more sophistication coming in marketing with behavioral science, you're introducing elements of kind of psychology, marketing science into it, and understanding the individuals, and you the point that you've made earlier about actually needing to speak to much more of a retail audience is that all of that kind dials into that part to making sure that the content that you're creating is actually speaking and resonating with those with those individuals. We we did some research quite a few years ago now. It was actually looking at how you convert savers to investors, and we had to test savers and show them a number of websites of financial investment firms, and they were almost recoiling in terror. We actually filmed it, and they were just like they they felt it was impenetrable, and it made them feel stupid.

And that is not the way to treat an audience that you're trying to persuade to come on journey with you for the next forty, fifty years. So That's complete yeah.

I mean, it's it's the the asymmetry, and I've just been doing some work on this. So this this sort of symmetry when you're selling to an institutional investor, you basically know similar amounts about the product. You're you're whether you're the investor, you're quite informed. You know that it's company a, b, or c.

You're asking technical questions and vice versa as the investor. As you go down the chain to more individuals, there's an asymmetry of of knowledge. You're talking to the end investor who, as you rightly said, knows nothing, doesn't really wanna know about it, and is quite scared about it versus the the firm that is you know, knows all the information about the product. So that's where where brand really comes into play.

You need to just, over a long period of time, sustain your your brand investment to to build up that, at least a little bit of understanding about who you are, what you do, and that I think will help you.

Andrew, could you could you tell me where you successfully integrated a marketing initiative into a wider a wider global strategy?

I guess the big one that comes to mind was when this mega merger happened between Aberdeen and Standard Life. They became one, and we needed to communicate both internally and externally why this merger made sense.

So we built a campaign called Extraordinary Connections, which really explained the virtues of, you know, the combined firepower and the combined breadth of product offering.

And that that really was a message to investors in the the merge business as in at a at a corporate level. It was a message to our underlying clients on both sides that this merger made sense. One plus one, hopefully, would equal three. And it was also a message explaining the rationale of the merger to, you know, this this new group of people who were were now work colleagues rather than competitors. So it was a pretty mammoth piece of work, but, you know, really, really important to to land it. And and it actually galvanized the two the two teams quite successfully, I think. Aberdeen Standard Investments, that was a a new brand, a combination of Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life Investments year on year before the merger and post merger managed to hold its hold its ground, so we were really happy with that.

I thought it was an amazing campaign. I mean, the the there's kind of various different trials and tribulations financially of the business. But in terms of the impact of the campaign against the metrics that that we set, it was enormously enormously successful. And just even the the ability to galvanize two organizations to do a fully integrated campaign across forty different markets.

And some moving parts.

Lots of moving parts. Two new teams coming together, multiple different languages. I thought the results were really kind of something pretty extraordinary themselves.

I wanna come back to a point that we discussed earlier. There seems to be a rising importance given to the from investment firms to the to the retail audiences, and I'm seeing this a lot within our own client base. And I I just wondered what your views were on is there a what what the reasons for that could be from a kind of strategic point?

Yeah. I think strategically touched earlier around about the shift away from DB and so on and so forth. But within the the inverted commas wealth market and the dynamic remains that the vast majority of flows in the the wealth market are still intermediated.

So it's usually around about ninety five percent will go through some kind of intermediary, be it a private bank, be it a wealth manager, an IFA, some kind of intermediary like that. And and the trend basically is happening is that the asset managers sit at the end of the value chain, owning the product. There's a danger of the fund manager and asset manager becoming disintermediated and far removed from the actual end investor themselves. If they don't have that direct connectivity with the end retail consumer, then they're not able to necessarily impact the product placement themselves and they and they're fearing lockout.

So hence why you're seeing dual strategies, I think, from a number of organizations where they're saying, right, we need to target the wholesalers, the professional fund buyers, and these intermediary organizations, number one, but equally making sure that our content is resonating with end customers so that one, there's an understanding and appreciation of who those end who the end customers are and a recognition of the brand. But then secondly, making sure that that that the end consumer has got an awareness of who you are. And if they see that in a model portfolio, for example, there's an appreciation.

It's a decent company. I understand that, you know, Schroders or Aberdeen or whoever it is, is a good quality company and I'm happy to have them in my portfolio. But I think that's the broad dynamic that's happening in the industry.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

Andrew, what as as we start to wrap up and bring this to a close, I'm I'm interested to to understand is what's the most useful insight that you've you've discovered which has helped you in your career of marketing and continues, as I said, perhaps a nugget of wisdom that you could you could share?

Take the time to really get to know your audience and walk a mile in their shoes if you like to ensure that your communication to them, you know, has the best chance of landing as you intend it to.

So, obviously, the work that you do, you know, content creation is what, as I said before, is is the backbone of the industry. So if you're going to do it, make sure you know who you're talking to. Same point for me.

I mean, the the the most impactful thing that happened in my career was actually spending time with clients.

You know, you're in a marketing department. I I think all too often, marketers don't necessarily get the opportunity to to speak directly with clients. So there may be the sales relationship and the marketing guys are back in the office.

And that was the most certainly the most informative thing for me in career was having that sustained engagement with either institutional clients, with professional wholesalers, or ultimately with retail consumers via various different marketing outreach programs that that we would undertake. And just that closeness of understanding what your your client need is and listening and spending time with the client is just massively kind of informative and and certainly helped me in my career.

Both great great points. Again, slightly ironic, I feel, when you we were in an industry of fund managers that whose job is to go out to businesses, meet the businesses and the individuals that they're investing in, kick the tires, as they say, is a phrase I hear a lot. And that's, yeah, good good good, good insights for us all to to, become better marketers. Thank you both for joining me today. Three key takeaways or insights that I've learned from the conversation today. One, taking the time to really dig deep into defining your brand and product and how it is differentiated in a crowded marketplace is becoming increasingly important.

Two, work in partnership with the finance teams to make sure that all the various activities that are completed under the role of marketing are not batched together in the ledger under one activity. This will become increasingly important, as Andrew and Andy stated, at times when the powers that be are looking for budget cuts.

Three, you need a shared agenda for sales and distribution, working hand in hand with the marketing teams to drive extraordinary growth. Working in today's digital environment, client relationships should be owned by the brand or business, not just individuals. The collective effort becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Please subscribe wherever you get podcasts from and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates. If you'd like to hear more from us, sign up to our mailing list via hubagency.co.uk.

Before we provide up all amount of services discussed at Project Goldbreathe, then you can contact me at david@.hubagency.co.uk