It's been a tough twelve months for both asset managers and investors. As we start a new year, many marketing teams within asset management and investment trusts are, I suspect, being asked to deliver more for the same or potentially less. It's against this backdrop that I wanted to explore marketing's role as a growth driver within investment firms. Today, we're joined by Simon Longfellow, an expert in investing with over twenty five years experience working within the financial services industry.

Having spent his career working with globally influential companies from Halifax to Janus Henderson, Simon is now using his years of financial experience to help the asset management industry better communicate with retail investors. He was cofounder of Steps to Investing, a company that provides resources to help people better understand investment strategies and empower them to pursue their own financial freedom. He is also the independent director of Electric and General Investment Fund and a nonexecutive director of Columbia Threadneedle Global Managed Portfolio Trust, which is an investment trust investing in other investment trusts to provide shareholders with either investment growth or a regular income.

Aside from that, he's a dog dad to German shepherd Max, a part time photographer, and an enthusiastic petrol head. Simon, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's a pleasure.

To kick us off, I'm just wondering what the latest mechanical vehicle it is that you've got on your driveway that is probably causing a lot of disruption to your fellow neighbors.

Needless to say, it's another Land Rover, so I think I'm up four at the minute. I think any more than that, I'll be getting letters of complaint.

So to kick us off, I wanted to ask a question which is at the heart of this series, marketing for growth. In your opinion, what is the role that marketing can play as a growth driver within asset management and specifically within investment trusts?

I think that's a great question to start and start the series with really because there are some contradictions in that specifically regarding investment trust. But, I mean, let's go back to basics. Marketing should be the growth engine of any business, really. I remember when I got my first marketing job at Halifax, and my mentor then sat me down and said, look, you do realize you're responsible for everybody's bonus in this business.

You know, pressure. No, absolutely. You know, you're driving the income in this business, So I do think he should be at the heart of a growth engine. A challenge for investment trust is they're not particularly fast growing vehicles when you compare them to open ended funds, for example, where money can come in the door very quickly.

It can also go out the door very quickly. But investment trusts tend to be much more stable, and they tend to grow much more slowly. But that's not to say that marketing shouldn't be involved in that growth process, not least because if you can get an investment trust to trade at a premium, and I know we're gonna talk about premiums in a sec, but if you can get an investment trust to grow at a premium, it can grow fifteen percent every year. Beyond that, if you can really sustain that kind of growth, you can then do this thing called a C share where you can go to the market and raise money in a massive lump sum.

So it's not to say that investment trust can't grow. It is just harder to do. The structures around it are harder to do than in an equity interest fund.

You've mentioned about premium discount. How do you think specifically marketing can influence the premium discount of a trust?

Yeah. I mean, this is where it gets a bit tricky because there are many different views on premium discount. The view that I've been schooled in and I have sympathy with is that you should discount the discount. You know, as an investor, you don't think about it so much.

As a board though, you are thinking about it because it is the rating of your company. You know, if you're out of favor, you are likely to be trading at a discount. What influences discounts, what can bring discounts to par and then to premium is regular incremental demand. The broker of your investment trust wants to see every day, every week, every month, small, regular, incremental demand for your investment trust.

That's what is likely to influence your premium discount, your rating. So how do you generate that? Part of the answer to that is retail investors because retail investors aren't buying in big lump sums and selling in big lump sums. They might be putting in hundreds a month or maybe thousands a month, and that generates this kind of incremental demand that should, over time, narrow discounts and and put you at a premium.

And marketing's got a job to play in attracting those retail investors. You know? Build it and they will come does not apply. Just because you've got a great proposition, just because you've got a great website, just because you've got a great fund manager doesn't necessarily follow that people will discover your proposition and start buying.

From what I'm hearing there, premium discount as a mechanism is not solely influenced by demand from retail investors as a combination demand from retail and professional.

Absolutely. And it's all kinds of other stuff too. Let me give you an example. You know, UK smaller companies are structured in such a way that, generally speaking, the sector trades at a discount.

So if you're in that sector that's sort of perennially trading a discount, what you're really looking for, I suppose, as a board is to have your trust rated at a narrower discount than the sector average. You know, are you performing better than your peers? As you rightly say, that could be a function of demand. It could just be a function of your popularity as an investment proposition as a sector.

If UK smaller companies are not in favor currently because of where we are in the economic cycle, then it's unlikely that in that period ever going to break out of that.

As a tactic for either a marketing department or a board, which is responsible for an investment trust, stimulating demand to either narrow a discount or push into a premium is a strategic imperative?

I think it is. There are other things you can do. So you can have something called a discount control mechanism, which essentially is a way to control the discount artificially in a way. And what you do is rather than allow there to be too much supply in the market if there isn't enough demand, is that you buy your own shares and you take them out of circulation, therefore changing the supply demand equation.

And the theory is that if you buy in enough, then your discount should narrow and your investment trust should trade closer to what they call par. The challenge with that is it's enormously expensive to buy in shares. You know, you spend millions of quid often in order to be able to move the dial. And there have been instances in the past where investment trusts have done themselves a disfavor by stating the level at which they'll buy in shares.

Because if you say, well, we'll defend discount of five percent, then essentially become a cash machine for anyone who wants to get out at that level. Because every time the discount slips beyond that, the board buys in shares, the company buys in shares, and suddenly, you know, becoming a cash machine. And there's good examples in history of companies that have shrunk themselves by half in order just to defend a given discount. My schooling has been around, not ignoring the discount because it is important, but actually to focus on other things, to focus on getting investment performance right, to focus on getting communications right, to focus on making sure that you are meeting investor demands.

All of those things, in my view, have a better than odds chance of fixing a discount problem rather than saying, let's just write a big check and provide shares.

And and you're you're in a you're in a unique position in that you've sat on both sides of the fence, shall we say, of Investment Trust, both as head of marketing in your in your time at Janus Henson, but also as a board member at Columbia Threadneedle global managed portfolio. I'm interested to explore how your perspective has changed, if at all, on marketing's role within investment trust.

Yeah. That's a really good question. I'm not sure it has changed too much in the sense that I don't think marketing is any more or less important. One of the things that you do see as a board member though is where marketing fits in the wider sphere of the operation of the investment trust and where it sits in the relative importance of all of the other things you have to do in your duty as a director and your duty to shareholders.

You know, it's not just about marketing. You know, when you're a markete, it's obviously the thing that you're focused on. When you're a board director, you've got a whole bunch of other stuff to focus on, the audit process, investment performance, all those other things that go with running the company. What I think has changed, it's perhaps a personal thing, but when I look back now to how I was when I was a marketer, I can understand why boards get restricted with marketing.

Why is that?

Because it's very easy in a marketing world to exist in this world where you speak this language of marketing that you and your peer marketers understand, but your fellow directors, your clients essentially, may not. It's very easy to get drawn into that. And I I could think back now and grin this, actually, some of the meetings I did as a marketer thinking they're not getting this, why are they not getting this? Now looking back, it's more obvious. You've actually got to bring board members along with you. You've got to speak the language of the board member.

You've got to get rid of as much marketing jargon as you possibly can and speak in plain terms about what you've been doing, about what you're going to do, and what the impact is of what you've been doing.

As we know, many marketing teams are also supported by agencies such as ours. What information could you give us to make us better prepared to ensure we're delivering the information that the board members actually want to know.

I think this is a virtuous circle in the sense that marketers and agencies can deliver more useful information to boards, then they'll get more airtime at boards. You know, it was always one of my frustrations to rock up at a board meeting and talk about the last year's worth of work and propose a budget and a plan for the next year and be told, right. You've got seven minutes to get through all of that. That's just very frustrating.

And that can be quite a demoralizing message, I think, for a head of marketing that's been working the socks off all year. Do you see a different side now that you sit on the other side of the fence?

And so what we've done specifically on Columbia Threadneedle global managed portfolio is we set up a marketing committee to make sure that it gets airtime, to make sure that the people who come in to talk to us, whether they're the people from the fund management company, whether they're agencies, whatever, get the airtime that they need to explain to us what it is that they've been doing and what they're proposing to do. And, ultimately, our job as a board member is to represent shareholders' interest. If we're spending shareholders' money, which is essentially what you're doing, then we need to be able as board members to justify the spend of that money, to explain the spend of that money.

We have an annual general meeting once a year where shareholders attend. If a shareholder would stand up and say, what have you got for your marketing dollar? Then we as board members need to be able to articulate that. And so we should be giving fair time to marketers in board meetings.

We should be probing and exploring and having that kind of role of oversight. But to answer your question, what do we look for? What is it we want to know? It really is about marketing effectiveness.

That's the key, I think, is, you know, we're spending money. What are we getting? And I think that's really tricky because you can't link a pound spend on marketing to David Huntstone buying some shares in a particular trust.

That's because of the broken purchase chain.

Yes. Because it's just not visible to you. So, you know, if you, as an investment trust, do some advertising, let's say, and you, as a retail investor, see that advertising and then go off and buy some shares at AJ Bell, for example, that's just invisible to us. And so there is that broken link.

But what is important is that the activities that in and of themselves that marketers are doing are performing well. And if that's a webinar, how many people attended the webinar? Who attended the webinar? Were they the right kind of audience?

What was the cost per view of that webinar? Have we assessed the individual activity in and of itself in its own right?

Even if we can't prove then that anyone who attended that webinar went and wrote a check and bought some shares. My view is that you've got to be out there. You've got a better than even chance of getting someone to buy your thing if they're aware of it. If they're not aware of it, they're just not gonna buy it.

My thinking around this and listening to what you're saying is that marketing teams and agencies and board members as well need to speak a common language. And part of the improvement in the relationship and the effectiveness between those two sides could perhaps be enhanced if we understood each other's language so that when we are reporting, if maybe at the beginning, you should have set the terms of reporting and you say this is what we're gonna be reporting on. Why? Then that forms the basis of the common dialogue so teams can report on what's needed and the boards understand what this actually implies and what value for money they're getting from their spend.

Absolutely. And I think it's incumbent on boards to find someone to sit on the board that can speak that language. Now I would say that, wouldn't I? If you look at the composition of boards, you'll have somebody perhaps who is a lawyer or you'll have somebody who's worked in investment or you'll have somebody who's been an actuary or you'll have somebody who's worked in audit because those are the skills, those are the requirements of the oversight of running the company.

You need someone who can intelligently interrogate a fund manager about why he's done what he's done and why the portfolio is performing in that way. You need someone who can appoint an auditor so your company can be audited, who can speak the language of audit. And that's historically how boards have been constituted. It's not until relatively recently that boards have also needed to understand the language of marketing.

I can't name names, but I remember going into one of my first board meetings, going into a very long, kind of old fashioned boardroom, the chairman saying hello, I sort of walked in. And then he sort of sat and turned with his, almost with his back too, rather than sitting and looking over down the table. I thought, this is very odd. It just acted as a as a signal really for where marketing was in the in the kind of mindset of the board.

This isn't important.

It's the coloring in department.

That's a very derogatory term that's been thrown around the industry that most listeners will have heard.

Yeah. It's it's this it's this horrible accusation that you're not as important as the fund manager or the auditor or the company secretary or the risk team or whatever the other bits of the jigsaw are. And to be fair, there's probably good reason for that. That reputation hasn't been earned just out of ignorance.

There's probably some reason for it. Birds, times have changed. And I think more and more, especially when we're talking about retail investors, boards are recognizing that this is not a skill set they have. You know, they've maybe had a financial adviser or a wealth manager looking after their money as board members.

So they haven't gone through this process themselves. They don't understand how opening an account at Hargreaves Lansdowne or Interactive Investor works and the decision making processes that retail investors are going through to decide which investments to make. So I think there is some recognition. And I think just like other issues with boards like gender, people's backgrounds, all of that is all in there at the moment.

People are thinking about the fact that we need to be more diverse in our thought and more diverse in our makeup, but it is a slow process. You know, if you look at gender, when I started an investment trust in two thousand nine, most of my boards were male. If I look at that company now, which Anderson now, look at the constitution of their board members, it's about fifty fifty, male, female. It's not exactly, but it's about fifty fifty, and it is continuing to move in that direction.

That's a great thing. And I think we need to think about that in terms of marketing as well. You know? Have you got a marketing representative on your board who can speak this common language with the market?

Marketing as well as as a discipline itself has has evolved enormously over the last five years. What do you think is the biggest mistake most trusts or boards are making when it comes to their marketing strategy?

I mean, a very simple answer to that, and it's not having a marketing strategy. It's doing things in a piecemeal, ad hoc kind of a way and not thinking about it as a joined up process. You're not thinking about this is marketing jargon, but those kind of top of the funnel activities that raise awareness, not thinking about what gets people to actually buy those conversion activities. So I think not having a plan is probably the biggest hindrance when it comes to marketing.

You know, that's understandable, as I said, because you haven't had people historically on boards who are in a position to help marketers formulate that plan. What can boards do? I think boards can be clearer about what is it they're aiming to achieve. You know, what is it we're trying to do here?

I think they can help fund managers and marketers think about the messaging. What is it we want to say? What is our proposition? Why are we different from anyone else in our sector?

I think boards have a key role to play in that. And I think they have a key role as an enabler. You've got to trust the people that you work with. You've got to be able to give them some rope to go off and do.

We as boards need to be able to encourage that, to encourage marketers to be bold and to do different things, not to dust off the marketing plan that they've been doing for the last five years or the marketing activities they've been doing for the last five years. It's to find the things that are going to work today, but also in the future.

We put together strategies and activities to execute on those strategies. But when we're looking at strategies, typically, we're looking at a three year strategic plan that then dictates the twelve month activities. Are boards able in their role to take a three to five year view, and will they see that through and support marketing teams in that long term view in order to support them in what they need in the here and now for the twelve month?

Yeah. That's a great question. Mean, short answer again is yes. They are able. And should there be?

Yes. Absolutely. They should. Historically, my experience, the boards tend to think in year long cycle periods.

What are we spending this year or even this calendar year, specifically around marketing? I think that's true. So I think it's incumbent on boards and on marketers to push for longer term and not to rush into doing something without knowing your target market, really. I think doing the research bit first, making sure that you understand the people that you want to communicate with, making sure you understand where they hang out, what they read, what influences them, what they look like, what their age is, what their demographics are, all of that sort of stuff.

You've got to spend time and ultimately money getting that right and do that from a position of proprietary research. Spend the time and money doing that rather than saying, well, I think it's like this. Should we go out and do, I don't know, some press advertising or some social media or should we do some Google Ads? All those things might be the right thing to do.

They absolutely might be. But I think unless you've spent the time doing the research, understanding content, whether it's advertising, whether it's podcasts, you know, where do those things fit? How effective are they against your target market? Who are the people that we're trying to reach and what do they look like?

Then to be honest, you're kind of throwing money away. You know, you've got to do that process and do it properly. You might actually have to speak to some real live investors. I mean, I've met many marketers in my career who claim to know who their target market is, and you say to them, well, when did you last meet any of your target market?

When did you last have a beer with any of them? When did you last speak to any of them at a function or invite them in for an informal research session or whatever it is? The answer is almost comparably, I can't remember. I don't think that's right.

I think you do need to be as close as you can to your customers in order to get the right plan to go.

To summarize that is do the research in order to identify the insights that are actually gonna form a strategy that can work, execute on that strategy, and then presumably measure those results and report those results to the board. Yes.

And if that takes five years or three years because, you know, maybe you're cautious as a board, maybe you've, you know, had some bad experience in marketing in the past, maybe you spent money hasn't worked. Maybe you've never done it in the past. You don't have to do all of this in the bat of an eyelid. Investment trusts are long term investment vehicles. We've been around a long time, and we want to be around for a long time in the future.

So it doesn't mean that you necessarily have to throw everything at it in the next fortnight in order to solve this problem.

That to me is almost more enticing because if you get this right, as we said before at the beginning, it's sticky money. So you get this right and continue to stimulate that demand, then in theory, that's where the growth comes.

Well, and this is a really interesting thing. I've been speaking to a fund manager this week about this difference between recruiting new customers, this shiny new thing. Let's get some new people in the door. Let's aim for twenty five year olds versus retaining your existing customers.

And any marketing textbook that you read, as you know, will say, spend time keeping your existing customers happy before you spend money trying to recruit new ones. And, actually, there are firms out there who prioritize in that way, but I think the temptation as a marketer is to go and do the shiny new thing and to try and get new people in the door because that's where the QDOS is. And actually, I think retention is probably eighty percent of the job. One of the things that I think prevents boards from thinking longer term is, well, we don't know where we're gonna be from a performance perspective.

We don't know how the trust is gonna perform in three to five years' time. We know where we would like it to be, but we don't know what the headwinds are. We don't know what the next virus outbreak is gonna be. We don't know where inflation is going.

But there are always gonna be those things happening, and arguably, you ought to be communicating more when the chips are down, when things are hard. Should prevent those outflows. Absolutely. You know, if your investment trust has dropped twenty percent over the last six months because something is happening, then you should be telling people what you're doing about it.

As a fund manager, as a board, as a marketer, you should be sitting around the table, I think, and say, right. What's the message, and how do we get that message out? True.

What do you see as the biggest gross opportunity that most investment trusts, in your experience, are not embracing?

I don't think this is over volute here. You know? I don't think turning on social media if you're not doing social media or bus sides or taxis. You know?

I think there's one specific marketing activity that is a silver bullet. Perhaps it's having a strategy. Well, there is that, but I also think we ought to be thinking long term. The investment trust has been around a long time.

We wanna be around a long time in the future. The challenge that we face as an industry is that generally speaking, investment trust investors, retail investors, they tend to be fifty five plus. There is a challenge, which is that if you're a very wealthy seventy five, eighty five plus, and your family inherits your money and seeks professional advice, whether that's through a wealth manager or a financial adviser, the chances are that investment trust holding won't survive that process. The chances are that that adviser will say, well, actually, sell all of that and get in our model.

And that those models don't, generally speaking, contain investment trust. They contain open ended funds and an exchange traded fund. So there is a challenge to our industry here. It's a long term challenge.

It's a drip drip challenge. It's not something that's happening in a big way kinda overnight. But I think the growth opportunity that we should at least considering, at least investigating is how to make investment trusts accessible and interesting to the next generation of investors.

When you say the next generation, if we're to talk about demographics, what age groups are we talking? Are you talking above forty to forty five? Are you talking next generation of, like, eighteen to thirty five?

If you talk to people in their in their mid twenties and ask them about investing, those that are investing already, and there are people who are investing in their mid twenties, what they do, all of us do actually, is try and find the easiest, shortest, simplest route to doing things. So if you're using your phone for almost everything in your life and you go to your phone to find an investment solution, the chances are you are not going to end up on an investment trust website. You're probably going to end up at a nutmeg or a Wealthify or one of those robo advisors, digital wealth managers that make this process of investing just look very attractive, very simple, very straightforward.

It looks like it's low cost. They make it very easy to do. There's an app for that. And we, as an industry, haven't really embraced that.

I think if we're thinking long term, we've got to hook those guys in at the beginning of the process. Why do you think that Nutmeg has been bought by JPMorgan? The answer is not to make money. Nutmeg have spent millions of pounds not making money.

But if JPMorgan can get twenty five year olds to buy Nutmeg and put a hundred pounds a month in Nutmeg at twenty five, by thirty, they'll be putting in five hundred pounds a month or a thousand pounds a month. By forty five, then JPMorgan's wider range of investment funds and ETFs, they own that data. They can sell that stuff to those people. It's this kind of cradle to grave strategy that those people are pursuing, and investment trusts don't figure in that. And I think we have to wake up to that fact.

So as an industry, we need to be more visible on investors of all age group, their path to purchase essentially, and and better visibility within all stages of that regardless of where they are.

Yes. It's it's relatively simple and straightforward to open an account with a platform, a Hargroves, with an AJ Bell, with an Interactive Investor, and then you're kind of left to it. Oh, choose from one of our six thousand funds. Oh, by the way, here's twelve thousand equities.

Right. Okay. Whereas with Nutmegas, I use them as an example. Here's a dozen portfolios to choose from.

By the way, you're a one out of three for risk. So you want one of these. Make it easy. It just makes the decision making process easy.

And you've got those people, as I say, whatever it is, fifty quid a month, a hundred quid a month. Vanguard, another example, Vanguard Life Strategies ETF's brilliant at this because you've got them hooked in until the day they retire in theory because they've got their target retirement date as the name of the fund. If you're putting in a hundred pounds a month now at twenty five and that's your pension, you are definitely gonna be increasing that as your income grows. There's an argument that says you only need make one decision.

We don't figure in that. We don't make it that easy.

So so change of tact here with this question. Thinking outside of a single trust, what is the role that marketing can play in helping asset managers win mandates to gain more trust within their established looking at growth from perhaps the house point of view.

If you're not growing trusts organically, the other way to do it is to acquire more mandates. Investment trust mandates come up relatively frequently. How frequently? Well, it's not every week.

And in the last year, there haven't been that many. But prior to COVID, again, it depends on markets and depends on what's happening and how boards are dealing with it. Some boards don't deal with it and just carry on and don't look for a new manager when there are problems. Other boards gonna put their hands up and say, well, actually, we've got a problem.

The slight challenge with boards doing that is, of course, is they're essentially turkeys voting for Christmas because not all of those board members will survive the process of a merger with another trust. So there's a self preservation happening there, I think. But a sensible board would say, look, This doesn't have a reason to exist anymore. We need to find a new manager or we need to roll it into another trust or we need to change the mandate or whatever.

And what role can marketing play? Well, when you, as a fund manager, go along and pitch for that mandate, then you absolutely should be talking about what you're going to do to market that trust. When it comes to you or it rolls into one of your other trusts, you shouldn't just be talking about what's the fee level gonna be, what's our skill at fund management, what are our risk and compliance people like, all of that stuff. It's critical.

It's all important. As a fund manager and as a board, you should also be asking the questions around marketing. You know, how much support are we gonna get? How much money do we need to spend?

What's your marketing team like? You know, what are your resources? It encompasses everything we've been talking about here. If you're moving from one fund manager to another and you're moving from a team of twenty marketers to a team of none, you know, you're just not gonna get the same level of exposure.

You should be asking those questions.

Are there objectives other than growth that investment trusts might pursue? And if so, what are the marketing team's role within that?

Yeah. I mean, that goes back to sort of your original question around the role of marketing growth. Investment trust might say, well, we don't really want to grow. We are five hundred million pounds.

We are doing okay. We're at premium. We're not we're not too bothered about growing to a hundred million. But, actually, we do have a problem because we've got a shareholder register that's very concentrated.

So maybe we've got five shareholders who own fifty percent of the shares, and that's a problem because if one or two of those shareholders decide that they no longer want to be shareholders, then that has the potential to almost blow up your company. One of the challenges might be around changing the nature of the share register, not just about growing, but making the share register more liquid in a way to have lots of smaller shareholders who don't have that ability to kinda blow up your company. That might be one of the challenges. How common is that?

Reasonably common, actually. I mean, in the last ten years, there have been some great examples also of what they call activist shareholders getting onto registers and fund them in alliance trust is the is the case study here really. Getting on the share register in such a size that they then not only can influence what the board is doing, but they actually changed that. I mean, the board changed.

The whole mandate for Alliance Trust changed. And so there are those kind of aggressive shareholders who have said enough is enough. We've invested in this. It's not performed.

You need to do something differently, and so force the hand of boards to do something. There's a third area too where marketing can play a role, and that is where your trust is trading at a discount. Your marketing can play a role there in helping move that discount.

I suspect you've attended a few board meetings over the years.

I haven't added it up, but I know it's over three hundred.

Wow. What's your sense of how aligned boards and investment marketers are around objectives like growth?

It's tricky one is this, because a board member's primary responsibility is for an existing shareholder.

Growth is secondary in a way. Because if you're a large enough investment trust and your fees are reasonable and there's reasonable liquidity in your portfolio, in other words, people can buy and sell your shares easily enough, then the argument for spending money trying to grow is this kind of tricky one because if you spend a hundred thousand pounds, two hundred thousand pounds trying to attract new investors, for every new investor you attract, an existing investor has to sell. If you're not issuing shares, for every buyer, there has to be a seller. So what are you actually achieving by buying that money?

That's the board's perspective. The marketer's perspective might be, well, you know, we're in a business that gets paid by the size of the investments that we manage. You know, we get paid sixty five basis points on every pound that we manage, so the more pounds that we have, the bigger checks that we get. And so there's this kind of almost like a conflict between what some boards might be looking for and what marketers might deem attractive in the kind of corporate environment.

And therefore, there is a risk that objectives aren't aligned. The market is focused on growth, but the board would question that. That's a horse for quarters issue. It might be an issue for some boards, it might not for others.

So as a marketer, I think you've to be sensitive to that. It's not about going into every board meeting with every trust that's in your stable and saying, right. We need to increase the number of shares in issue by five percent this year. So, again, growth may not be the right strategy.

Identifying what the right strategy is for the individual board or the individual trust or the individual business upfront is as critical.

It is.

And that's that conversation you've got have right up front is what is it you're trying to achieve here?

What is it that you want to do? I suspect that conversation is sometimes not hard.

I know it's not hard because I learned from my experience, which was the corporate entities always focus on growth. Bigger is better. Well, hang on a minute. We're a seven hundred and fifty million pound trust.

Why would we wanna grow? We're liquid. We're reasonably priced. We compete well. We've got great performance.

What's the benefit to our existing shareholders? Conversely, if you're sub a hundred million and you're illiquid, the costs of running your company are being shared amongst a very small number of shareholders, then you might be saying, well, actually, here, we've either kinda gotta grow or die.

You know, we we we need to be bigger to have a reason to exist, or we've gotta go down that route of merging with another trust or hanging up our hats and giving the shareholders the money back.

A fabulous insight. Time to get out of the crystal ball. Looking forward, where do you think investment trust marketing will be in five years' time? I think at this unique perspective that you have, I'm interested to get your thoughts on that.

Where I think it will be and where I kind of like it to be are probably two different things. I think in five years' time, we probably won't be that different from where we are now. We are not at the bleeding edge in this space of marketing, I don't think. So we're not trying out new technologies every day.

We're not inventing new ways of doing marketing every day. But I do think that over time, we, as marketers, need to embrace some of those. We need to test some of those things out. It goes back to the point I was making about dusting off last year's marketing plan.

I think that's an error. But if you've got a plan that works and it's driving traffic into your website, if that's an objective, or it's driving investors, or it's people who are listening to your podcast, absolutely fantastic. There's no logic in stopping doing that. But what I would say, and I've tried to do this in my career as a marketer, is spend eighty, ninety percent of the money doing what you know will drive a result.

Spend the other ten or twenty as if you're never gonna get a return. You know, take that risk, take a chance, because you might discover something that is really interesting and that investors really engage with, that investors find helpful and useful, and that moves the going forward.

Simon, thank you so much for for joining us today on our podcast.

Thank you.

Three key takeaways that I've learned from the conversation today. One, marketing should be the growth engine of any business. As Simon's business mentor at Halifax said, remember, you are driving income into the business.

Two, don't overcomplicate marketing terminology when dealing with the C suite, or if you're working in investment trusts, when working with the board.

As with any industry, we have our jargon, Keep to a common language between specialties within the business.

And three, don't be guilty of not having a proper marketing strategy. Remember, objectives first, then strategy, and finally, tactics execute on the strategy.

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. If you want to find out more about our services, discuss a project or brief, then you can contact me at david@hubagency.co.uk