Nick's expertise spans a broad spectrum of marketing disciplines from digital to offline channels, including significant achievements in brand development, strategic marketing planning, and executing high impact campaigns.

At Invesco, he applies this rich background to navigate the complexities of the asset management world, driving brand consistency globally.

In this episode, Nick will share insights into his approach to brand management, the importance of building strong relationships and driving change, and how his extensive experience informs his strategic vision at Invesco. Join us as we delve into Nick's strategic mind and explore the future of branding in the financial services industry. Nick, thank you for joining us today. You've had a very interesting career to date, now Invesco. Perhaps you can give us an overview of of, your your career journey and what's what's led you to Invesco.

Yeah. Absolutely. So I can take you all the way back to university because I think it's quite important. Interestingly, my observations, I obviously work in marketing, but I tend to find that people who work in marketing may not have necessarily done a marketing degree, but I actually did a marketing degree.

And I'm not saying that that puts me in better stead. It may not be. But I actually learned quite early on after doing that degree that that was the interest in the area I really wanted to pursue. So I did that.

During that degree, they had a placement year, which is very useful because obviously university is very theoretical. It gave me the opportunity to sort of take me out the ten hours a week of lectures, you know, it's very limited to actually being in in industry. And I went to work for General Electric. It was part of their financial services arm.

So it was GE Capital. Right. I worked in the Insight team. So really good grounding for me because it was about, you know, understanding customer macro trends, market trends, helping the business with their primary research needs, secondary research needs.

And then also part of that placement, the business itself actually went for a rebrand. So that was my first foray into seeing how a business goes through the process of changing. So they went from GE Capital to GE Money, which is more aligned to the US business as well. So I came back, did the rest of my degree, actually did a dissertation in branding, internal branding use GE money as the example to interview.

And then took a year out to travel around the world before I decided to come back and become an adult.

I then picked up a a contract role for RBS.

And that was working on the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest consumer banking brands. And that was very much around targeted direct communication. So mailing out to the prospects, the customers, trying to drive revenue there. I did that for about nine months, managed to secure a new role just before RBS were caught up in the global financial crisis, and landed the role at post office.

And that role was around being a marketing campaign manager. And that was where I really got the opportunity to do sort of more of a broader marketing role. So very much through the line delivery from doing brochures for all their huge network of branches to some really exciting TV campaigns. So for example, I worked with Roger Moore, you know, James Bond, for a savings campaign Oh, splendid.

To someone like Amanda Lamb who, we we bought in for a sort of quite innovative, one of a kind, innovation, which we did this sort of home renovation of customers who applied, we had to renovate their homes in twenty four hours. Oh, nice. And then we advertised it all over TV. Very stressful.

I wouldn't recommend it. But, actually it was very impactful because it was very different and never been done before.

And I was really glad that post office allowed us to do that. So I did the marketing communications role for a number of years and then had an opportunity to move over to brands.

And that's really where I started to really build up my love and understanding of of of brand and brand strategy and so forth as well.

Managed to rebrands whilst at post office, rightly or wrongly, whether we should have done another rebrand and we can maybe go into that later on.

I do sort of label it as Europe's largest rebrand again, rightly or wrongly, because based on the amount of branches there are, Post Office at the time were the largest retailer in Europe as well. So I spent my time in Post Office and then moved over to Sainsbury's. And then at Sainsbury's, I took up a role of, again, heading up brand, specifically for the Sainsbury's brand.

And within that time, that was managing the visual identity, the tone of voice, the governance around the brand. They are very particular how they manage the brand and rightly so because there's been some incredible results that we've managed to achieve from being very specific in what our distinctive assets are and building that out as well.

And then I evolved into another role whilst I was there. So I headed up brand and creative and I had more of a broader, portfolio of brands underneath me. So I had Sainsbury's, Habitat, Two Clothing, and Argos. Broadinary. And a quite a large creative team that sat underneath me as well. And we obviously worked with with other agencies, but what I inherited was a very large creative team from the Argos business.

And that was fantastic. And my day was so varied. It could be working with the art director and my team on what the Christmas catalog is going to look like. And they'd have a big place to shoot all the all the stuff.

You know, people would be building, you know, a house in a warehouse, and then they would be shooting it, to things like, non food packaging design. One of the really things, one of the big projects I was quite proud of was the plan for the business was actually to sort of reinvigorate the Habitat brand. Obviously, it had a lot of equity and heritage, but it was at a very certain price point. And we wanted to make it more mass aspirational.

So we needed to sort of think about how that brand starts to show up and how do you appeal to more of a mass audience. So we actually did the rebrand internally with my creative team. And it's really amazing to see how some designers who perhaps haven't necessarily got the experience in brand, but fundamentally understand the backbones of it, to rolling out, you know, a full new brand identity, brand guidelines and getting that signed off as well and not having to sort of rely on the brand agencies, which absolutely we've done in the past. You know, there's complete merit to doing that. You know, one one of the guys, one of the designers in my team even created the type. You know, they did the type by themselves. First time they've ever done it and it's still out there today.

So That's so great, isn't it?

Yeah. Really, really fantastic. Learned a huge amount.

And then one of the one of the things I was cognizant on with my career was it's very UK centric. In my experience, some of the work we were doing with Sainsbury's around franchising was sort of starting to think about other markets, but I very much knew that it was just a UK based experience and I wanted to sort of globalize what I was what I've done in the past. So I came across a company called Invesco. I briefly knew them from the financial pages, but didn't really know much.

Dug in a bit more. The role itself sounded like a really fantastic opportunity. I had a number of interviews, had a really good sense of the culture just from those interviews. They're all done over Zoom because it was during COVID. The CMO is ex agency. So again, I had a really good sense of the platform, the opportunity there.

And yeah, I got the role and the role itself is again head of brand management for just the EMEA region at the time.

Did that for a couple of years and then I've, again stepped up into a newer role, which is looking after brand strategy for EMEA and the Americas as well. So, it's quite a broad career. But now how I look at it is, you know, the way I sort of look at it is more as a t shape. So you do many different components of the marketing mix. Yeah. And I've now, I think, specialized into brand.

I see.

Quite specifically. I guess the way I I sort of if I was to sort of build on a a famous quote, of Benjamin Franklin's, I think, you know, some things in life, a certain death, taxes, and I'll add branding onto that as well. So quite flippant, but I think there is an element of truth into it. I think the other thing about brand branding, brand management, however you wanna package it, there's a lot of variety in it. And it's very it's a very important component of the of the marketing mix, but also from a business perspective as well.

Phenomenal. What a what a varied career you've had. I have to say something you mentioned right at the very beginning of that story was your placement year in general lecture. That has to be hands down the best placement for setting up for a for a foundation for the rest of your career. I mean, the what you covered in that, how long was that foundation?

So the course itself was four years, but you have one year in placement as well.

What you covered in that year was phenomenal and gave you such a broad insight to a number of different facets, Mark, which has led you on, think, given you such a a great foundational level for all of the things you've achieved.

Yeah. I think I think every, you know, everything you do in work, every job is not going to be something that really fulfills you, but the things that you will learn from. And you can understand whether it's something you want to progress into and learn a bit more and be curious and open to and some things you know you can try and avoid. There is obviously some things you just can't in life, you know, like multiple meetings, although you can always manage that.

So I think, yeah, those experiences I had earlier in my career and throughout my career to date have all served me into where I am today. It's very valuable. I hold my hand up, I'm still learning. I think it's very important to be open in, you know, not knowing all the answers and to continue to, you know, build and learn from the people around you as well because I work with very smart people too.

Yeah. So so you're now in Invesco managing the brand across EMEA and the Americas.

That's gotta present some unique challenges. What can you tell us about the strategy for I guess, the the the number one challenge that springs to mind for me is how do you maintain that level of brand consistency across from a global perspective, but there's gotta be regional challenges that exist within there. How how how do you go about doing that?

Yeah. No. Absolutely. So, I I can maybe speak to a a recent project we're just coming off the back of now. So this is something where we pulled a cross regional team together, and the outcome is we've onboarded a new global creative agency.

But I'll talk about the problem we were trying to solve. So what we noticed across the region so we had North America, we had EMEA, and we had APAC.

If you put all the work up onto a wall, you could probably squint and see some kind of thread in the color maybe, but actually the execution of the different campaigns and how the brand was showing up was quite inconsistent and very different.

So we felt like there was an absolute opportunity there to bring in a tighter system and for all the reasons and benefits you get from that cohesiveness in the brand, better recognition, better brand attribution, hopefully better effectiveness in what you do.

The other thing we wanted to imbue into the work was to think about being global where possible and regional where necessary. So we know that just force fitting a one size fits all is just not going to work in regions. So we wanted to be aware and made sure that the system we designed was going to be built for that.

I think the final point was that unfortunately asset management brands tend to lack any strong personality. I think there are absolutely some out there, but they tend to lack the personality, which of course means that they're not bold in what they do. And I understand why the industry we operate in, it's quite analytical and so forth. But I also sort of challenge the fact that our audience don't want to be bored.

They're looking for some form of stimulus and they're also overwhelmed as well. So if you can cut through and find a way to do it effectively, you're going be more successful.

So if you think about how brands show up, they tend to say the same things.

They look the same, they use the same stock photography library. And again, I know it's around budgets as well. Color was another thing we identified. So Invesco's core color palette was blue.

We looked at a number of other asset managers company. They're all very blue. They're all very blue. Yeah.

One of our competitors even sort of recently rebranded and they have used an almost identical blue as well. There was a sort of strategic consideration in terms of what we needed to do from a project point of view. The brief was a combined brief between regions. So it wasn't EMEA leading it or North America or APAC.

It was very much us all together in a room getting the brief signed off. And then what we did was we went out for RFI and invited a number of agencies to come and pitch for us, went through a fantastic process. I really think they are brilliant and I really thank all the agencies who contributed to that process as well. It was really stimulating.

It was great to have us all in the room together as well. And now we have this new brand platform that we're starting to roll out as we speak. So it has a refreshed identity. It has an accent color that we think is going to be very disruptive in the market.

And also I think it's going to be something that we feel is going to be a lot more distinctive into anything we've had in the past as well. And we know this is going to take time. It's not something we will have in place for a year and then we scrap it and we start again. This is a longer term platform that we execute across regions as well.

Everyone will play their part in that process as well. And we've just done a really brilliant activation led by the guys in New York where one of our products has been promoted and they've just done this huge three d billboard in Times Square, looks brilliant. Team got a shot underneath it, really looks fantastic as well. Just trying to think about effective ways to land that message out in what we do.

Part of that is bringing the internal team along with you as well isn't it I'm guessing?

Yeah so part of that process I think it had to be there was a core group that were there to set the agenda and know exactly what needs to achieve.

And everyone's opinion counts in those forums. That's one of the good things about Invesco. They talk about diversity of thought. It's not just a top down, this is what we need to do and everyone follows.

So everyone's opinion counts. But the internal side of things was also important because we needed to get the perspectives from other regions within EMEA. So for example, making sure that you capture their thoughts, understanding, knowing what their red lines are as well. Because if you go into region, there could be some cultural references that you just want to avoid.

There could be some color you have to avoid, certain messaging as well. So that needs to all be accounted for. So I think it's really important to make sure you land the views and feedback from Teams because that's going to gain more momentum and more traction in actually wanting to use it.

Thankfully everyone was really positive. You do these teams calls where you present to everyone, obviously everything's virtual these days but given a global audience. And there was a lot of emojis, the claps and the harps because everyone understands what we're trying to do. We're trying to drive more attention.

But it is more than just a comms platform. There is, I think, something more broad that we can do from a brand point of view where we can really make it work and make it effective.

Well, like you say, and this is going back to what you mentioned earlier about within the space, there's a lot of commonality within brands across the sector, not just within the favoritism of blue as as the same color for money management firms, but also in the way they go about describing what they do and lack of distinct assets, guess, is key. And when you have a number of investment products to the end consumer, it's very hard to have that kind of, well, who do I choose one over the other? And I think by taking the exercise, what you're doing, the effectiveness comes through being on that shortlist of brands, products in the end investor's mind.

Absolutely. I think that does very much link to the brand strategy piece.

I think the role of brand within asset management is really, really important. And I think it shouldn't be discounted. Think brand strategy needs to be in service of the corporate strategy otherwise it will fail. There's no point creating a brand strategy that's not aligned to corporately what we're planning to do, it needs to be in service of that.

But I do think brand strategy is a key component of business growth. And we're thankful that our CEO is very supportive of what we do. He understands that we are the experts in what we do. He'll have an opinion and that's great, but he will rely on us to deliver what we need to do.

And he knows what levers we need to pull and some of the fundamental things that need to happen to be successful.

I think as well, sometimes you have to play the role of trying to validate the power of brand to an audience that is very analytical. And I think there is a piece of Kantar research where they looked at the S and P five hundred and they looked at the share price over a period of thirteen years. And they compared it to the brands that were voted top ten, I think in the brand Z ranking. And the top ten brands share price were one hundred percent higher than the overall S and P five hundred.

So there's a real financial gain that you can do by having a strong brand and a point of view. But remember, brand is not just communication, it's a sum of all parts. It's the experiences that every client, every person interacts with you. And again, I will talk a lot about the importance of brand assets and distinctiveness, but brand needs to be flooded through all the touch points to really make it work.

Clients have a huge amount of choice. They've got hundreds of asset managers globally access to. All of them have probably quite homogenous products and capabilities.

And really brand is about trying to favorably position our offer in the target audience mind. To your point, we need to get on that mental shortlist. If we ask a client to think about who does fixed income or who is private markets, If you're in the top three, you know you're gonna be considered. Yeah. So that that's really important. The other thing about brand is it's about the future growth.

And there's some research that is more broad. Relating to b to b, but I think it's from the LinkedIn Institute and they talk about ninety five percent of b to b buyers aren't in the market at time. So that's why the brand is really important because it hopefully is a way to serve up you top of mind when they're ready to start thinking about where they wanna allocate their finances and so forth. It's just one final point I want to make on this as well.

I think brands allows you to be more successful longer term because hopefully it starts to attract the customers of the future.

So in our industry, everyone knows there's going to be a huge transfer of wealth.

That's more end investor but those end investors will want to invest their money somewhere.

You need to think about, okay, where is that money potentially going to flow? And you need to be positioned in the right place to when it starts to come that way as well. So although our target audience is not necessarily end investors, they still perhaps have a influence on, you know, if they have financial advisors or if they go direct to, you know, wealth platforms as well. So, yeah, fundamentally, I, you know, I would argue the point brand is is a key, you know, driver of growth for the business.

I I completely agree. I I a couple of things that you said there. There's the firstly, the support of your CEO.

So I'm keen to hear your your musings on whether you think, the issue within financial services or asset management, probably not financial services, but maybe more so in in asset management, where there is that very closeness between is is homogeneity the right word that you've got that? Things look the same.

They feel the same.

They sound the same.

Yeah.

Do you think that there's a lack of belief in the financial impact of solid branding amongst the c suite? I think It doesn't sound like there is at Investo, so I'm not trying to lead you.

No. No.

I'm just after you because you've obviously sat in different sectors, I'm interested in your unique perspective on what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah, I'm quite relatively new to the industry but I've been to some events and talked to peers on this and I do think that there is a challenge.

It's tough at the moment because budgets are increasingly being competing against other priorities and sometimes brand is the thing that gets forgotten about because it isn't valued by the right people.

And I think that is actually not on necessarily the CEO's responsibility, it's actually the marketing team's responsibility to make sure you're having those conversations, you're validating it with data, with the strategies that are hopefully going to move the dial. But brand, there's no doubt about it, brand is an investment. It's an important investment and it's a choice you have to make.

And if a CEO or a finance director has a choice between improving their website or investing into lower down the funnel activities, more of those short term activities, they may buy it on the short term because they know that that's going to generate that amount of revenue what we need. But is it really investing in those future clients and customers and the growth that you need? So I think it's a challenging one but I do think it's a responsibility of marketing to show the way Yeah. And really validate how we can, you know, offer that value in the growth.

Yeah. Yeah.

So let's let's start, I guess, talking about you you transitioned from consumer goods to asset management. I love, by the way, your day in the life of of Sainsbury's story, that you could be working on multiple things. Yeah. Clearly a very different organization. So I'm keen to understand the the lessons that you could perhaps take from that more consumer focused branding role into asset management and and what lessons that you learned that you could help you navigate that change?

Yeah, no, for sure. I think that they are two very different beasts from what I've experienced, but I do think there are absolutely some fundamental commonalities that flow through and you can apply that thinking into the world of asset management for sure. So one of the areas that I guess I really sought to build my knowledge and understanding is thinking more strategically about your brand and specifically about brand assets as well. So this has been a quite hot topic probably now for a number of years with Ehrenberg Bass and Byron Sharp and so forth as well. The power of distinctive assets from my time at Sainsbury's, we tracked all our campaigns and communications.

We knew how effective they were, whether they were recognised, but also whether you could actually back to Sainsbury's. So what we did was we got to a place from our rebrand that we were getting, I think, industry leading attribution scores. So Joe Public on the street could look at one of our ads, obviously the logo would be covered up, and they'd be able to say that Sainsbury's. So four and five people, that makes your media and your execution a lot more efficient in nature.

The other thing we did was we did a distinctive asset tracker, which essentially was you put an advert into this, I don't know how they created it, they probably just pulled it apart and each asset was assessed by the audience. And they would be able to say whether they could recognize it or not. And you could get to a point where you could either recognize it. And if they could recognize it and also attribute it back, that's obviously the area you're trying to go.

There's also a place where you may be misattributed and it might be your competitors as well. So that gave me the understanding of the power of having a consistent brand and why consistent brand execution is really important, but also thinking about how you deliver it across the different channels as well. So the other thing we did at Sainsbury's was once we launched this new brand, we obviously had it from a advertising perspective. Everything was very consistent.

We flowed that look into the supermarket itself. But actually the background of the advertising was white. And that just doesn't cut through at all when you're in the supermarket, you need to be disruptive. So we were very clear after sort of working it through that we're happy not to be completely consistent in the execution because the role of the advertising in store is very different to when you're outside in a Sainsbury's environment to what it needs to do.

So again, you have to think very strategically, what is the role of the communication and what are you trying to achieve off the back of it? So that kind of thinking is something I've sort of taken over into Invesco.

I think it's hopefully been contributed to why we went down the route of seeking out a new agency.

You mentioned you've just bought in a new agency to help with the global branding. I'm just interested in how you manage that from an operational efficiency point of view, partnering with an agency. What are your views on that?

Yeah, I think it's an important part of the overall mix of an agency.

Obviously, you're bringing them in for new thinking, you're buying in their creativity. But operationally, that should not be forgotten.

I think what underpins good operational delivery is actually having brilliant relationships. I've worked with a number of agencies in my career and I've seen certainly sometimes things start to go a little bit downhill for whatever reason.

So trying to maintain those relationships is important for both parties because they're coming in to hopefully do great work and you want to give them the ability to do that great work as well by trusting them. You need to have that relationship very closely aligned. And also the partners who work with that agency as well. So making sure that the briefs are really tight.

Think bad briefs are just not great for anyone involved. Being super clear in terms of what you're trying to achieve, who you're targeting, I think are all really important parts of that. I think as well, really making sure your agency understands your brand.

I know that seems like a really obvious one, but some agencies might be working not on a retainer, but just on a project by project basis. So they may also want to really push the boundaries of the brand. I've seen this in the past as well, where you have a campaign team who come about and they want to do this new innovative amazing thing.

And you have to be open to the idea but you also need to think about how does that impact this and that and the other? And you have to take that helicopter view from brand point of view and you also need to manage your agency partners to not feel stifled as well.

It's quite a tough one to sort Balancing act in a way, isn't Yeah, absolutely.

And then really specifically on the operational side of things, I think certain agencies may be doing repeat work for us and you really hope that they are working off templates as much as possible, showing us the opportunity of things that could be costly as an original piece of work. But actually once it's templated and it's maybe just a case of automation now, then you can start to reap the benefits of that as well. So you need to make sure that the people that you work with internally who are briefing the agencies, again, back to the point of the brief, it's got to be clear because you don't want to encourage waste and the men's later on down the line.

Yeah, so I like that again that's good advice about using the agency to come in with that strategic from a creative point of view but then also laying the groundwork to gain those efficiencies within the implementation as it starts to roll out across the different regions?

Yes, look at it almost like a real trusted extension of the business. And again, it's so important, it's a partnership, it shouldn't be treated in any other reason.

And you also need to play a role in helping build their credibility because one thing that goes wrong can really have a negative impact because people start to talk and therefore you need to actually catch that fire and hopefully put it out and actually build those relationships again. Performance management with your agency, regularly quarterly meetings, again, important part of that overall relationship.

You talked about creativity and about bringing that in with with agencies. In in your role, which where it's completely pivotal, creativity, where do you go for ideas to to kind of sharpen that that part of your brain?

I guess I I I'm I'm someone who is open to an idea anywhere. And so my natural inclination actually is to look outside of category in industry.

I think there's some brilliant podcasts, obviously one that I'm on right now. Absolutely, thank you. But there are others, of course, that talk so one of them that I listen to is called Uncensored CMO. That's a very good podcast because that again brings people from brands but also people from agencies and they talk about their stories and case studies and it could spark some inspiration. I also think that absolutely you need to look at what our competitors are doing.

One recent campaign that caught my attention was from Vanguard. I think they actually came onto your show and they showcased how they wanted to drive active to their audience. Yeah. And I thought that execution The tough mother campaign.

Yes. We worked on that. Yeah. Exactly. I I just thought it was so this actually got sent around, in Invesco.

Oh, cool.

And, you know, it caught Tell her she'll be so pleased. It caught a lot of people's attention because you're doing something very different and unexpected.

But I think there was real strategic intent and I feel like that's a platform you can work off. So we are looking at what competitors are doing as well because I think it's important.

I think the other thing as well, we spoke about working with great partners.

I think that psychological safety within teams as well is important. I think knowing that creative ideas aren't just to preserve because you've got creative director in your title, they can really come from anywhere. And we've had projects where we've got all of us together and just said, look, let's see what we can come up with.

Let's have a certain framework, ask the right questions. And you never know what could come up. Ninety five percent, ninety eight percent of the ideas may just be in the bin but then there could be two percent of those ideas that could be really valuable as well.

The other thing that we've done and I've done in previous roles is getting into a really good habit of creative audits. So putting all the work up that's gone out And just again, just evaluating what do we like, what could be better, what insight have we got, what were the results of that, what were our competitors doing.

And just trying to have that language of people feeling comfortable because again, you don't want it to be just three, four or five people saying this is great from a creative point of view. You want everyone within marketing to feel comfortable in assessing what they think great creative looks like as well.

I really like that approach. And you mentioned putting everything up on the wall before when you were saying if you'd looked at it when you come in that you saw inconsistency, so that's clearly an approach you use a lot, creative order, and such a simple idea but probably starts to generate lots of very pertinent questions.

Yes. Yep. Absolutely.

Yeah. Brilliant. So looking forward, I guess, a million dollar question, future trends.

What do you anticipate is gonna shape the future of branding, specifically within asset management sector? We've we've talked about this, saying that there's a lot of, similarity. So where where do you see future trends?

Yeah. No. I think it's a it's an interesting question. I can I'd probably look at it from more of a a cautious side and a cautious point of view, just speaking from experience. And, you know, it was mentioned about my post office days where we rebranded twice.

Yeah.

Now I think the first question you have to ask is why are you looking to rebrand or why are you looking to change your brand? It should never be a personal preference. It shouldn't be based on senior stakeholders just not liking how the brand shows up. There should be a proper diagnosis of where you sit in the market, are you still relevant, what are the challenges you need to overcome.

So I think just trying to understand the problem and the barriers before anyone starts to change anything completely unnecessarily. I think that would be my first consideration. Don't change just because all your competitors are doing it. Have a real strategic reason behind it.

I do think there are obviously a lot of conversation now about generative AI, the opportunities there, what it can bring. I've just seen this really cool company called Suno, I think, where you can just type in the prompt of music track that you might want and it literally pumps out a pretty good, almost well polished pop track or rock track, which obviously can be used from an efficiency perspective if you wanna put it behind a backing video. I'm not saying that this is going to be something you want to put on your Christmas TV campaign as well. But obviously the transition to more of a digital environment, digital relationship, obviously those face to face relationships still important and turn up to events are fundamentally important as well.

Just being better in terms of that digital experience because you've got newer companies now in fintech who are offering brilliant experiences from a consumer perspective.

How do we make sure that that experience where relevant to your audience is slick and easy? Because the last thing you want is you get someone through the door and they are now finally interested but that experience from a web point of view is just lacking.

So I know that's not necessarily from a brand point of view but They're brand touch points though.

Exactly, yeah.

It's not a branding point of view, it's a brand touch point of So thinking about all those experiential moments and actually events I think are an important touchstone for us because that's when you can really start to experience the brand real life.

So doing something that feels different, that cuts through, drives the attention is really important. We did a large campaign about two years ago, worked with our Italian partners and we were launching the fund on the metaverse. So obviously metaverse felt like it was a hot topic. I still think there is complete relevance in the metaverse and obviously Gen AI is the new hot topic at the moment but metaverse is still an important part of that future experience I think we're going to go through.

But to really bring that campaign to life, we actually just got everyone in the room together. We brought our agency partners in the room. We actually got our web experience team in the room, content team, a strategist from the agency and actually had a whole day workshop and just went through the problem we were trying to solve and went from the morning to the afternoon evening with a strategy, a potential creative execution, and campaign activation ideas off the back of that. And it was a slightly gimmick but they created a perfume of the metaverse.

Obviously it's an Italian audience so they liked that. And they used that perfume at an event, they had all the headsets so clients could really try out the metaverse in real life. And it just adds something different. Just goes beyond that bog standard round table event where someone just speaks at you and there's not really anything that really makes you think, oh, that's memorable.

So I think the industry is going to absolutely keep catching up and progress and be innovative. But I do think it needs, not bravery because I don't think that's quite the right word but it needs passionate people to really bring that to life and make it happen. Also you need the right marketing team to enable that to happen as well.

Fascinating. There was some something you mentioned there about the digital touch points and specifically focusing on asset management. Asset management is a you talked about the the, you know, challenges from fintech as well, startups from fintech, who aren't incumbent, by legacy tech.

And then asset managers, particularly the larger ones, been around for a long time Yeah.

That can sometimes be slightly hamstrung by legacy tech. How do you close that gap between the upstarts with fintech that I feel that there's a very real problem there that is probably not discussed. It's discussed in other areas, perhaps more operationally, but not necessarily talked about from a customer experience marketing point of view.

Yeah. It's it's very interesting, isn't it? I think that that I guess the slight compromise you have as a FinTech company is you don't lack the brand heritage that may become important if someone wants to consider you as well. I don't think that's the number one barrier. Just think that is a factor.

But I think that's why large asset managers may look to acquire other companies to bring in that capability. Again, you have to then plug in all that tech and legacy into it. I'm I'm not a tech or data person, but I can imagine that is a very complex, problem that you have to work through. But from a brand point of view, you need to make it as simple and easy, as stress free for the client because again, if they feel frustrated with your experience, like I say, they have choices.

And our industry is perhaps less about quick movement like what I've been used to. I can go to a Tesco's or a Sainsbury's easy enough. It's a bit harder to sort of move your portfolio of money to one. But there's no reason why if there's a frustration there, why they wouldn't do that.

So again, you have to be cognizant of all those touch points. And as I said at the start, brand is more than comms. It's the sum of all parts. And that really needs to be an important part of how you work with all the stakeholders across the organization and build that education and understanding.

Not everyone needs to know the complete ins and outs of brand, but the people who do, who have the biggest impact on clients, I think that's important.

So for any, just to wrap us up, any marketers that are about to embark on a branding exercise for their organizations, asset management firms or other financial services organizations, Having gone through the process in financial services and other organisations and sectors, what would be your kind of advice to those folk?

Yeah, I'd say buckle in. No, I think again just be very clear on what you're trying to do. Have a real clarity of what problem you're trying to solve.

Is it that sales are just dropping or is there an awareness problem? What's the core problem that you need to overcome to essentially hopefully get yourself back into the growth territory?

I think make sure that you influence and talk to the right people early on in the process as well, get people aligned to what you're trying to achieve. Hopefully you'll then get some investment behind what you're trying to do from a brand point of view. Have a project manager if you're doing a rebrand, think those kind of you know, process parts are really fundamentally important because, again, depends on how you're delivering your rebrand. It could be you wanna just wash everything firm and and launch it in one go, or you could be more pragmatic and and do it over time.

But if you're doing it in one go, project manager will just get everyone aligned. Just be open to feedback just because you've got that expertise. It doesn't mean you're always necessarily right in how you're going to deliver things. Being open minded, consult.

I think one of the big parts of being within brands is actually your consulting. You're consulting across different parts of the business. You have to have a really strong point of view and you have be constructive in your perspective as well and not be afraid of giving into other strong stakeholders because they want that. That's really important. And again, that should be backed up by insight, data, anything that supports your overall brand strategy.

And then I think education is a really important part of being in brands as well, making sure people understand the importance of brand and what it will be there to deliver. Each person is a brand advocate ultimately and they work for the organisation that is a brand, so I think that's very important.

Yeah, fantastic insights. Thank you so much, Nick. Thanks for taking the time this afternoon to share that information and knowledge. That was an absolute masterclass, So, yeah, really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Great to be here. Thank you.

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