By 2025, the UK investment trust sector had contracted by nearly 20% in just three years. Discounts remained wide. Retail flows were negative. The average shareholder was over 60. And the sector’s primary response was share buybacks.
Buybacks are a legitimate and necessary tool. They are not a solution to a demand problem. They manage supply. They cannot build awareness among younger investors who have never heard of an investment trust. They cannot shift perception among advisers who have stopped recommending closed-ended funds. They cannot close the gap between what investment trusts are and what the market understands them to be.
The uncomfortable truth was that a demand-side problem was being tackled almost entirely with supply-side tools. Marketing had become the sector’s missing lever: under-resourced, under-prioritised, and consistently treated as secondary to investment management in the sector’s hierarchy of concerns.
Hub conceived The Missing Lever as a sector-level intervention, not a client campaign.
The central argument was that if the investment trust sector was to remain relevant, marketing needed to be elevated to a strategic, board-level priority, and tackled collectively rather than trust by trust. No single trust’s marketing budget could move the needle on sector-wide awareness. But coordinated action, with a shared narrative and a shared platform, could.
Documentary storytelling was chosen as the format because it was the only format capable of carrying the weight of that argument. A report would be read by people who already agreed. A conference panel would reach people already in the room. A film, with the right voices, could reach boards, policymakers, and the financial press simultaneously, and create the kind of conversation that outlasts a single event.
Hub led the creative strategy, narrative development, and content production across the initiative, working alongside Warhorse Partners on sector positioning and Quill PR on media engagement and launch.
The Documentary
A 33-minute film featuring 23 voices from across the investment trust ecosystem. Contributors included Julia Hoggett, CEO of the London Stock Exchange; Richard Stone, CEO of the Association of Investment Companies; Simon Crinage, Managing Director and Head of Investment Trusts at J.P. Morgan; Baroness Sharon Bowles of the UK House of Lords; Ryan Hughes, Managing Director at AJ Bell Investments; Ben Conway, CIO at Hawksmoor Investment Management; Ewan Lovett-Turner, Head of Investment Companies Research at Deutsche Numis; board chairs, fund managers, non-executive directors, and financial journalists. The film explored why the sector was losing relevance and made an unambiguous case for coordinated marketing as the mechanism for reversing the trend.
The Launch
The Missing Lever premiered at the London Stock Exchange in September 2025 to a full audience of board members, marketing leaders, and financial journalists, followed by a live panel debate calling for a national investment trust campaign: the first of its kind in more than 25 years.
The Platform
A dedicated campaign website at themissinglever.com, hosting the full documentary, extended individual interviews, an executive summary, an expert panel Q&A, and a white paper outlining a 12-month strategic roadmap for boards. The platform was built as a durable resource for the sector, not a campaign microsite.
The Ongoing Programme
The Missing Lever became the foundation for The Blueprint Sessions: a regular invitation-only lunchtime series for investment trust board members and senior marketing professionals, run jointly by Hub and Quill PR, continuing to build the community and the momentum the documentary created.
The Missing Lever is the clearest demonstration of what Hub does at its best: identifying the real problem behind the presenting one, building a creative response that is proportionate to the scale of the challenge, and convening the right people around it.
Investment trusts didn’t need another factsheet. They needed a mirror held up to the sector, with the most credible voices in it speaking plainly about what needed to change. Hub built that mirror, brought those voices together, and created the conditions for a conversation the sector had been avoiding for years.
Creativity, grounded in insight, can do more than sell. It can help entire sectors rethink their future.
Watch the full interviews here: themissinglever.com
