His distinguished career includes pivotal roles at Allianz Global Investors, AXA Framlington, Fidelity Investments and PwC, where he has consistently driven profitable sales growth and digital transformation initiatives.

A passionate advocate for strategic marketing, Neville has shaped marketing strategies across diverse markets, emphasizing the importance and alignment of marketing with broader business objectives.

His work at Impax has been instrumental in navigating the company through significant growth phases, demonstrated by the multiple awards his team has won for their work.

Join us as Neville shares his insights into the evolving role of marketing in asset management and his vision for future growth and innovation within the sector. Neville, thank you so much for joining us today. To kick us off, could you share with us your journey in marketing and what led you to your current role at Impax Asset Management?

Sure. I started in this industry in the City, actually. I came out with a university degree, an economics degree, and my first job was actually a sales job. I was selling economic forecasting tools to FX traders.

Right.

So, you know, I'd walk into the trading floor, which as you may remember back in those days, some of them were the size of football pitches.

Yeah. A noisy environment.

Noisy, lots of bad language, and so that was a baptism of fire for sure. I mean, I had to get the attention of FX traders on a trading floor in the City of London. Wow. That's not easy to do.

And whilst they're in the fire.

Whilst they're deep in the thick of trading and they probably had less than a nanosecond's worth of attention to give me.

So actually there's a marketing lesson in there somewhere, I bet.

For sure.

But the other big lesson was I didn't want to do sales after that baptism.

Yeah. So what led you — what was the next move?

Then I simply applied for a job with Fidelity Investments, and I started doing customer service work with Fidelity Investments. That was a formative experience for me. I spoke to something like fifty or sixty individual investors every day.

Retail investors?

Retail investors. Retail investors on their client service lines.

Amazing.

And I did that for three years. And I learned a lot about their hopes and fears. And to this day, you know, I never forget. We talk about asset owners in this industry. In practice, they're the real asset owners.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I never forget that. And I also think about regulation and the importance of it because frankly, a lot of those people were misadvised — not by Fidelity, but by other advisers.

Phenomenal, the opportunity to speak to that many individual investors. How many years ago approximately was that?

That would have been nineteen ninety-two.

Okay. So do you recognise the same problems now about what you were hearing from customers back then?

Oh, good question. I do, actually. Yeah. I mean, I speak to fewer retail customers now.

Sure.

Apart from friends and family, but their feeling about taking risk hasn't changed. You know, they want some return, they want something better than the bank, but they don't really want to take risk.

Yeah.

You know, their desire for income hasn't changed at all.

Their feeling about personal finance and the kind of mental load and strain that it takes on individuals hasn't changed at all. So some things haven't changed, I have to say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. So after Fidelity, did your role change at Fidelity?

My role did change and I started marketing at Fidelity, which was my first foray into marketing. After that I joined a boutique asset management firm called Framlington and I guess that was the first time I became a marketing leader and led the marketing there.

That was a really interesting experience. I was lucky enough to look after both marketing and comms at Framlington. So, you know, we can talk a bit later about how that played out, but a boutique asset management firm, I think, is a great experience for anybody in this industry because you do tend to see the whole shooting match from end to end in terms of an integrated campaign. So that was a great experience.

By that, do you mean that in a boutique you get more control over the whole spectrum of marketing? Because many marketing managers — many people I speak to — only get to work on one aspect of marketing. Actually, it's a very broad church, marketing in general.

You're absolutely right. And I think the people that you've spoken to on this podcast, many of them are from the bigger asset management firms and so they tend to specialise in certain areas.

Yeah. Yeah.

At a boutique firm, you do get to see all sides of it, whether it's digital, whether it's content, whether it's events or comms — you get the whole breadth of it. If you can bring that together — and control is important — you can bring that together and bring some of the stakeholders with you, magical things can happen. And I think in that period, they really did.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's Framlington. Where was the next?

Yeah. Then from Framlington I went to Allianz Global Investors where I was for nearly ten years actually. And that's going from a boutique asset manager to one of the world's largest asset managers.

Yeah. Big change.

Big change. Big company. But again, I was lucky in as much as I was able to control quite a lot of the marketing aspects at Allianz. But I mean, that firm — you might remember it for the BRIC Fund — which we grew from forty million pounds to something over a billion pounds.

There were many others, but it was a period of quite strong growth then, and again I learned a lot in that time.

Yes, yeah. And then after Allianz?

After Allianz I wanted to try to see what the marketing world was like outside of asset management.

Right.

So I joined PwC, the professional services firm, and that was a fantastic experience. I mean, they did look at marketing differently.

Yeah.

I have to say it was probably more professionalised than in asset management.

Can you give me an example of what you mean by that? Okay, let me phrase this another way. When you say a bit more professional, are you saying that at that time asset management marketing was less professional?

I see where you're getting. I think the difference is that at PwC they definitely focused on the marketing brief more — the strategy.

Okay.

It still happens in asset management, that's good, and it still happened back then, but less so.

And with PwC the firm was so large, with so many important stakeholders — the partnership — you kind of had to lay out the journey before you began the journey.

Okay.

So you had to get the strategic thinking in place before you started work. They were very good at that.

There are different types of firms. Some firms are marketing-led. I guess that was where I was going. I was wondering whether you think PwC is a marketing-led firm, and that then means the firm gets behind marketing more.

We're going to talk about this coming up, but sometimes marketing's been called disparaging names within companies and is less inclined to be believed as a driver of growth — it can be deemed as a colouring-in department. So I guess that was where I was leading, but we'll come on to that.

Yeah.

So after PwC?

So then after PwC is when I joined Impax Asset Management. I took my time. I really wanted to find a business that did something positive for the environment and the community.

Right.

So I looked for a business that was somehow at the intersection of investments — because that interests me. I'm an economist by training.

Yeah.

That did something good for the world and also, of course, had marketing involved. So luckily for me, I found a job that was absolutely perfect.

And just to get my bearings, when did you leave PwC? How long have you been at Impax?

So I've been at Impax five years.

Right.

Five years ago I left PwC — a little bit longer than that — and I've been at Impax five years now.

Fantastic. Great. So we're up to date. Thank you very much for giving us that background.

Let's go back to what I was just mentioning about the colouring in department stereotype. You must have heard that phrase. It drives me up the wall, to be honest. And that was the sole reason why I decided to launch this podcast, to try and start surfacing good practice within marketing.

But I personally believe marketing can be a growth driver within businesses. I don't want to put words in your mouth.

But you mentioned marketing and strategy and key parts of business. What are your views there?

Yeah. That's so important to me personally because I've just seen what happens when you don't get the strategy right. Yeah. And so much goes wrong.

There's so much editing involved and so much tension involved when you haven't got the strategy right. So the colouring in department, it's a bit disparaging. I mean, I don't hear that phrase much. I sometimes use it myself sometimes when I don't want to do the work and say, look.

We do the colouring in, like even somebody else can do that.

But seriously, you know, the strategic part of marketing is absolutely fundamental.

And I think about people like Mark Ritson, and I think you have maybe I've done the course.

Done the course.

Yeah. I haven't done the brand marketing one.

You and I are the same. I haven't done the brand one, but I have to say that was a real eye opener for me. Yeah. When many years after working in marketing, I did the Mark Ritson Mini MBA. And a lot of my thinking somehow came out there and it sort of affirmed what I'd been thinking about getting strategy right.

The point I'm making is that, at the beginning of any kind of marketing journey, whatever you're producing, a big campaign or something small like a video or a brochure or a fact sheet, we really have to pause as marketers and say, look, who's the target audience? Yeah. What's important to them? What are the messages that we need to land in this piece of work?

What do they know about our business?

What do they need to know about our business? What worries them in the world of investment? You know, what kind of investor are they? A foundation, an endowment, a fund selector, a pension manager?

So really understanding the audience and really understanding what you're trying to achieve. That conversation has to happen. It's really important that it's written down before you begin producing anything. And it doesn't need to be a novel.

Two or three pages will do, but just write down the strategic brief, have that conversation, and then begin the journey. And if you don't, you can end up in all kinds of pickles.

Yep. Yep. So there's some fabulous stuff there to unpick. I love the fact about championing actually getting a brief and writing a brief down clearly. I think there's a skill set just there on its own which all marketers should actually be taught. There are some great resources for that as well.

But I also think that by thinking about the actual audience first, coming from their perspective, that's great advice. So many times my entry into this world was from the world of video.

And so many times we'd work for organisations that would say, I want to create a video, and it would be their chance to have this PR piece where they're just speaking about themselves and broadcasting it to the world, not thinking about how the message is being received on the other end.

I believe you're saying the same thing there.

Same thing. And there's a temptation for lots of people, salespeople, portfolio managers in particular, to go straight to the tactic.

Yeah.

And it comes from a good place. They want to amplify their voice.

And so their knee-jerk solution might be, Neville, we need to do some blogs. That's what we need to do. Yeah. When can we start the blogs?

We need to do a video because I've seen that Schroders video and it looked great, and they often do look great.

But going straight to the tactics isn't the starting point. Right? They are tactics, as you know.

Whether it's social media, videos, all that sort of stuff, those are tactics. So really the question I have to ask them is what's the business problem you're trying to solve?

Oh, Neville, they don't know that we have a great emerging markets team.

Okay. Who's the they?

French investors? Well, not French investors. No. No. Those other investors. Well, tell me a bit about those investors.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And then that conversation begins about what you're really trying to do. Once that conversation has happened and it's written down, we could reflect in that moment and say, actually, blogs aren't the answer. There's a different set of tactics here that might bring the solution that we need. It's not a blog.

Yes.

It may be an event. It may be a roadshow. It may be a video. It may be something on social media.

There's a lot of tactics that we can use. But starting with the tactic is not the best way to begin. And the problem, some of the issues that marketing people have, is that we immediately hear the tactic and start managing an event.

We start with events or start with a video, and we forget to take a moment to think, is that the right tactic or not?

Can you add a bit of colour here, talking about colouring in development? Can you give me any examples of strategic initiatives that you've led or been involved in?

We talked about Framlington, the boutique asset manager. That's a good example, I think, of growing a brand. I was there for six years and I think in that time we almost doubled assets, not always because of the marketing, we had great portfolio managers as well, but that's a good example of integrated marketing campaigns.

I think whatever we did, we tried to integrate the marketing and the comms and the client service and the content. We brought it all together and really thought strategically right from the beginning.

We were able to integrate our messages and if you do that again and again over a six year period, you can really add value to the business. I mean, the business was bought for two hundred million pounds by AXA Investment Managers. If you want to talk about the value of a brand, I mean, there it is in cash terms.

Of course, they bought a whole business, including the portfolio managers, but I think the Framlington brand then went on to last beyond ten years in the AXA umbrella. And I was very flattered to hear that. I didn't know that until recently.

That's great.

Spoke to my friends at AXA. Oh yeah, Neville, we're still using the Framlington brand. It's actually still being used within AXA to this day. Wow. Eighteen years later.

So I feel very proud that whatever that brand means to people, somebody's chosen to hang on to it.

Yeah.

So that's a great example of a brand that has meaning behind it.

Yes. Yeah. And is there another initiative perhaps at Impax? I think it was globalising the role of marketing within Impax from your own perspective.

When I joined, that was one of the challenges that we were given. We had a marketing team in London and a marketing team in the United States of America on the East Coast, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

And my brief was with the head of marketing in the United States, Sarah Grennan, to bring the two teams together and globalise them.

So now we have globalised them. We have a global digital team, we have a global events team, we have a global marketing product team, we have a global production team, and we have a global design team.

The only local part of the marketing mix is the channel marketing area, and I think that probably should be local. That works very well. So Sarah Grennan looks after her kind of local sales team, if you like, with her channel marketing team. I do the same for the rest of the world.

You say that was a requirement when you landed the role at Impact. How would you actually go about globalising it? Because it sounds very easy to say, but I imagine there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears involved in actually achieving that.

Yeah, there was blood, sweat and tears, but actually the journey wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be.

Okay.

Because Impax is a relatively good size to be able to do that kind of work. It's not a behemoth in terms of asset management. It's a big asset management firm but it hasn't got hundreds of thousands of employees. At the time, something like one hundred and twenty.

So size helped. The backing of senior leadership helped as well. It's not an initiative that I had — the whole business wanted to globalise their marketing function — and it just made financial sense as well. Globalisation often means efficiency.

So because I had the backing of senior leadership it worked okay. Cultural differences for sure, so I went over to the United States and my counterpart came over to London and so we kind of got to know the whole team on both sides of the Atlantic. That helped a lot as well.

Bearing in mind you've just come out of PwC, a massive global business, been in the boutique — do you think your experiences at PwC prepared you for making that transition to a global team quite smooth?

I think it did. I think it did because PwC were very good at stakeholder management. If you think of the partnership structure at a professional services organisation, those partners are very powerful people.

Often each partner will have two or three hundred people working for them, and I had thirteen partners to do the marketing for. Stakeholder management mattered a lot, so just the way that was done is important.

That helped a great deal.

Yeah. I can see that. I can understand that coming out of one environment and then that next. You probably sailed through — not sailed through, I don't mean to belittle it — but it probably eased it because you could see the routes you needed to take clearly.

Yes. I mean, one thing I did fairly early on at Impax was I played the quick win card, and I hired a good designer fairly early on.

And I don't want to overplay the colouring department thing, but actually if you can show people what high quality design looks like fairly quickly, then you win a lot of credibility quite quickly.

So I hired a good designer and immediately people could see that our brochureware was stylish and our website pages were stylish and our collateral just looked good.

And that's something that can happen quite quickly. If you buy a new technology system, it might be eighteen months before you can use it properly. But a few quick wins helped my journey, I have to say.

Well, things like that then start to build momentum, build belief in the marketing team. They can start to see how, okay, this team, this department is actually supporting us in other areas of the business. So anything in life, you need to get momentum to get it moving, don't you?

You do, and a little bit of early buy-in early on as well, and that really did help.

That leads us nicely into the next part I'm keen to talk about, and this is, shall we say, the doing of the role of marketing — the more operational side. And the thing that I know that you've noticed, but we speak to a lot of people on the podcast about, is the ever-expanding array of martech that's out there. There seem to be new tools coming out every day. I know I've been on the Ritson programme. They don't teach you how to choose marketing technology suppliers, but it's a key part, especially of senior roles.

The other part that I'm interested in is that you often have to deal with a wide variety of suppliers, from very large organisations down to small agencies. I'm just wondering how you navigate that yourself, how you learn those skills and how you pass those skills on to your team members.

That's a really good question. Let me think about that in two parts.

The technology side?

Yep.

So, you know, I've listened to your podcasts. I think they're fascinating.

Thank you.

I have to say, David, I've learned quite a lot just listening to the conversations that you've had with other marketing leaders.

But one thing that's coming across quite clearly is the involvement of technology in marketing. Now we are buying technology to help us go about the business of marketing — to professionalise it, to make it more efficient, faster, with lower error rates — all the good things that technology can bring.

So marketing leaders in particular will have to buy some technology. Big deals with Salesforce, with Marketo, with Seismic.

You're right. That isn't in the marketing handbook. How to do that isn't in the marketing handbook. It wasn't in my economics degree. I've never been taught how to do that. So that is a skill that somehow needs to get learned quite quickly.

I think my advice is to make sure that you've got a clear brief, and the marketing skill in writing a brief will help with that. What are you trying to do? Make sure you quote out the job.

There are lots of technology suppliers that broadly do the same thing, so have lots of conversations. And off the back of those conversations early on, you can finesse the brief. You don't know what they can do — they will tell you what they did for some of the biggest asset managers in the world and you'll say, oh, I didn't know that was possible. Let me just adjust the brief a little bit because I'd like one of those too.

Yeah.

So let that conversation happen.

That's a great tip.

It's like an evolving brief. Get it down, but then be prepared that you may have to adapt as you go.

May have to adapt. Keep an open mind. There'll be a point where you say, okay, I think I know what we want now and what you guys are capable of. Then you can start having the negotiations.

Negotiating with suppliers — these are expensive pieces of kit — so somewhere along the line you need to learn how to negotiate. Again, that's not in the handbook.

Is that something you pick up on the job? Is there training that you've had in any of the roles that you've had previously?

It so happens I have had training in negotiating skills actually.

Yeah?

Yeah. At the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. I was flown out to spend a bit of time there to do a negotiating course and that helped a bit. But I have to say mainly it's on the job.

What I do now is take my team with me when I do some level of negotiation so they might pick up some skills along the way. I make that part of the learning journey within my team — how to work with suppliers.

Just getting on to the second part of the question and talking about suppliers, I think right now I probably work with twenty-five different agencies.

Right.

Wow.

Of one kind or another — big and small. So you have to be able to bring the best out of them at a reasonable price. I don't want any more or less than that. Get the best out of your agencies at a reasonable price, brief them clearly, and enjoy yourself along the way.

So that's a skill in itself, and that actually takes — I think you can only really learn that on the job.

Neville, can you give me an example of any of the agency suppliers and pieces of work that you're working on currently?

Yeah, I can. You'll know that content production is really important in asset management. Listening to the podcasts that you've been hosting over the last few months, the leaders you've spoken to all talk about the content that they produce. Interesting content is super important.

At Impax, we produce a lot of interesting content really focused on the transition to a more sustainable economy, because that's what we do.

What's important for marketing people is that that content gets the attention it deserves.

Yeah. The right eyeballs.

The right eyeballs. And that can be quite difficult because engagement rates can be quite low across the industry.

So we work with businesses like Asset TV, for example, when we do our video work. They help us produce the videos. Lots of people can do that. I think their unique strength is the size of their database.

They have a database of six hundred thousand professional investors around the world. I don't think any asset management firm has a database that size. So when we produce something that's video-based, they can help us distribute that.

And a great partnership that you've got working together with your internal team and relying on external expertise to do a part that you haven't got that expertise in.

Exactly. We're not the best people to manage a database of six hundred thousand people. Asset TV do a good job of that.

Any other partners?

Yeah. Data visualisation is a topic that's come up in your podcasts in the past, and bringing data to life is increasingly important, particularly on websites.

We've partnered with a business called Instinct Digital that are experts in data visualisation and bringing data to life, particularly on websites.

So over the coming months you'll start to see the Impax website have areas where we're able to display the best of our product range in a really tidy format. We're going to build a fund centre with Instinct Digital and we're also going to build a preference centre with them as well.

So a couple of projects there that I'm really excited about that are in play at the moment.

Great.

Whilst we're on the subject of data visualisation, I have to call out one of my LinkedIn heroes, James Eagle.

I don't know if you've seen his work?

I have seen his work, yeah.

He's absolutely fantastic, so he's my data visualisation crush, if I'm allowed.

I have to say, for a lot of us as well.

No, he does great work actually.

And it's reminded me of another business that we're starting to work with at the moment, a brand new business called Markets Recon.

Again they help get the right content in front of the right people.

I'm really excited about the work we're doing because, as I say, we produce a lot of content. It takes a lot of thought. I'm really proud of the work we do at Impax, the content we produce — some of it is award-winning.

Our comms team do an incredible amount of work producing really interesting insights, and we get a lot of good feedback on them. I just want that content to get in front of the right people.

Yeah, that's so good to hear because so many people get focused on the tactical side of things. They get involved in the day-to-day — create content, create content — and then it's done and they're on to the next thing.

They forget about actually getting the eyeballs on it, because if no one sees it, there's little point in it.

So it's good to hear. I want to go back to the marketing tech piece, if I may, because as I was listening to you it struck me that choosing the right kit, for want of a better word, is one part.

But the implementation of that is actually dealing with another component of the job, which is how you go about organisational transformation. Because marketing technology often touches more than just the marketing department itself.

So what's your view on how you navigate those waters?

Yeah, that's really interesting. It's not easy to get that right.

Look, the salespeople at the technology companies will tell you that it takes two days to implement.

Right? That's a fantasy.

No technology takes two days to implement — a big piece of technology.

And in those moments I say, well that's good. Can you come with me and implement it?

Yes.

Buy the implementation with the technology if you can. Don't spend a hundred thousand pounds on the technology. Spend seventy thousand pounds and with that little bit of extra funds that you have, buy the skill to implement it well.

Yeah.

Right? That's really important. Either bring that expertise in-house or let it come with the deal.

At that point they'll often say, oh that's another thirty thousand pounds.

And you're like, hold on a minute — how is it thirty thousand pounds when you told me it takes two days to implement?

Which one is it?

Either it takes two days or it takes six months. Come on.

Yeah.

So if they come with you, then you'll find the implementation smoother.

Be realistic about the implementation. They will tell you all kinds of things, and I think sometimes they're just a little bit overconfident in that respect.

How much is involved in selling the strategy up the business, but also selling the strategy down the business as well?

So important.

Of course stakeholder management is essential when you're looking to spend budget on a serious investment.

Stakeholder management higher up is really important. But across the piece, actually having the sales team buy into that technology — whether it's Salesforce, Marketo, or Seismic — that's really important.

And that can take time. That's a cultural shift.

That journey is absolutely essential because I have seen cases where businesses have bought technology — and I've been part of these firms — and the technology just collects dust.

Yes.

Or it only uses ten percent of its power. And that's a real shame.

Yeah. I've spoken to technology suppliers that put in the implementation of tools and sometimes it's taken so much effort, energy and time to get the system installed — sometimes over a year or two.

And then people are exhausted and they move on to the next thing.

You must have seen that.

I've seen that many times.

Actually I talked about my first hire being a quick win — a design person — and people immediately saw the results.

My second hire was somebody who could use the technology we had already bought.

We bought the technology and were using ten percent of it.

And I hired an expert in that particular technology and she transformed our marketing automation across the Impax marketing team.

That's great because then you've got the double hit — you've improved the design look and feel, but you're also speeding up the operational efficiency.

So I can see why you're still at Impax.

Let's talk about balancing tactical needs with strategic goals. It's a point you raised previously.

Impax has gone through rapid growth during your tenure. How have you balanced those?

You've got immediate tactical needs coming from the business, but in your mindset you've also got to keep in shape the business's long-term strategic goals.

Can you give some examples of challenges you faced during that period of growth at Impax?

Sure.

Philosophically, when we plan I'm experienced enough now to know that there are a lot of known unknowns that will come our way.

COVID — we didn't predict it.

None of us predicted it.

But what we typically do is leave a bit of space for those known unknowns — those surprises that come our way.

We're in asset management, so stock markets go up and down. There'll be surprises — oil shocks, wars, geopolitics, political matters — and we need to react to those.

Our clients deserve a quick response to what's happening in the marketplace.

That should be no surprise to marketing teams.

So I try to leave space so we can jump on those quite quickly and deliver the kind of client service they deserve.

At the same time, in the background we keep going on our long-term strategic objectives.

If you throw everything at long-term strategic objectives and you've got no time to react to what's happening in the market, then you end up in a pickle and it causes stress.

So we try to make space for the known unknowns.

That's such an interesting point.

I was speaking to advisers who say when these world events happen their phones go crazy because clients call up asking what they should do.

They look to asset managers to provide collateral to send out to their clients to keep everyone calm.

So it's interesting hearing that from your perspective — accepting that these black swan moments happen and giving yourself the bandwidth to deal with them.

Exactly that.

And it shouldn't surprise any marketing person that things happen in the world of stock markets and politics.

We're always ready to talk about those.

Yes.

I was listening to The Rest Is Politics on the way in this morning and they were discussing the surprise of Trump coming in.

But there was someone on the ground in the US who had called it two days before because he'd been speaking to people.

In the UK it seemed to come as a complete shock.

It did.

That's a good example of looking at rational data versus hope.

Sometimes there's quite a gap between those.

Well, I've talked about the six pillars that we use at Impax across the global team, most of which is now globalised, with the local teams dealing with work on the ground locally.

I think what's really important is empowerment. The co-leader of the marketing team, Sarah, and myself, we want to make sure that the people who work in our teams feel very empowered to go about their business. So we give them the confidence to go and do what they need to do. They are experts in their field — that's why they were hired and trained in that way.

So I think a high level of empowerment is important. You don't want to be told what to do all the time. Give them the goal, give them the tools and the training, and then trust them to get on with it.

That really works, I think.

Yeah, it's good to hear that. How would you allocate resources to individual departments to make sure that you're managing the long-term direction but equally being prepared for the short-term surprises? How do you go about setting out with your team the spread across the six areas of business?

It was a challenge. It's always a challenge. We stay close to the sales team — as close as we possibly can get. They will have sales priorities, frankly, and we can't promote everything all the time to all regions. So in the end we need to understand what are the top three or four products that we want to bring to market.

What are the top three or four regions or countries that we need to talk to? Within all of that, the audience types — is it mainly endowments, family offices, fund selectors, or pension funds? Somewhere in that there’s a matrix of audience, geography and product type. We do need to lay that out. That’s what I spend my time doing and making sure that aligns with the overall business goals.

Once you've done that, it's easier to then let those priorities flow down into campaigns and therefore the work that the team need to do.

I'm going to ask you a question here, which I'm intrigued to get your response to, and I know that you've done the Mark Ritson programme as well. So within that, Mark talks about understanding first the strategic goals of the business.

Once you've understood the strategic goals of the business, your job as a marketer is to put together the strategy to solve those goals. At that point you work out how much that's going to cost from a budget point of view, and then you take that to the business.

The majority of the time that I see within the work that I've been involved in is that the budget is dictated by the business. For me there's this mismatch. When we talk about removing the stigma of the colouring-in department, it feels to me that until there is a balance and an understanding of what marketing can generally do to drive the growth of the business, we're going to keep having that imbalance.

In your career have you seen that friction play out? And have you got any advice for other marketers on how they can have that strategic conversation?

I do understand the conundrum there. When I joined Impax and when I've joined asset managers in the past, I'm often asked the open question, Neville, what does it cost to make us famous?

To make us well known in a particular market, with a particular topic, or just generally as a business — what does it cost?

I can't give them an answer. They don't always like the answer because it can run into the millions if you're talking about a global business. So it can work both ways.

Before I put together the strategic plan I will go to the leadership and say, look, do we have fifty pounds to spend, or five hundred thousand pounds, or five million? Give me a rough idea of what you think this business can afford.

For example, if we want to be well known in Japan — I understand the brief. We want to be well known in Japan with this particular audience. But do you have a sense of the budget?

If they say five million is too much but a few hundred thousand we can invest, that gives me some kind of guide rails. If there’s silence and they say, Neville, you're the marketing expert, you tell us, I will tell them.

There’s enough research in this industry now to understand what it costs to be well known in any particular country at any particular time. Businesses like Research in Finance are excellent research firms for the asset management community. That would be my first phone call — what does it cost?

And I can give them the answer. They don’t always like the answer, and then the conversation starts.

Yeah, that's interesting. I've seen so many times conversations that start with “if money's no object, what’s possible?” and then people spend a lot of time putting together proposals that were never realistically going to happen. But I think you're right.

I think you're right. Look, I've personally spent four million pounds in a four month period in the ISA season at Fidelity Investments, for example. Four million pounds in four months. So you can spend wisely that kind of money.

I've also built campaigns for fifteen thousand pounds for the professional market that look good and do the job. So there is quite a range of options.

And I guess that is the skill of the marketing person — fairly early on — to get that part right, otherwise you can just go off on a tangent.

I like how you're framing it though, because what you're saying to the business is be respectful of my time by just giving me the parameters. My role as marketing director is to deliver the best strategy for the business, but give me the parameters because I need to understand what is commercially viable from a marketing perspective.

So it seems to me that having that two-way dialogue is a sensible way forward.

You put it really well there, David. Be respectful of my time is a great phrase.

Some people think when I ask them to complete a marketing brief that it's some kind of application form. Like, oh I've got to complete Neville’s application form before we can get anything done.

But it's not an application form. It's so that I spend my time wisely, and the time of my team.

Let's move on from the budgets and move into another area of innovation.

I know that again it's tied into the technology conversation we were having earlier, but there’s a lot of innovation happening in marketing. The industry seems to be evolving at rapid speed. We've also got the problem of legacy technology — in one hand we're trying to race ahead but we're also tied around the ankles with a chain behind us.

What has been your experience of programmes that you've put in place — whether technology or innovation — within your team or department?

Yeah, it's a good question. I can give you an example of a trial we're running with our US intermediary team.

It's a very digitally focused campaign. I'm reflecting on a podcast that you did with the team at BNY Mellon — I think it was Charlotte.

Charlotte, yes.

It was a really great conversation because the work that she and her team were doing — I think it was Spain — was really interesting.

Similarly, we're picking a relatively small audience in one region and doing a digital-first campaign that involves client scoring. It involves looking at the engagement of those clients through our digital assets, our websites and content that's online, reacting to that engagement, doing automated follow-up emails and bringing clients through the buying funnel using digital engagement.

That's a fascinating piece of work led by our head of digital who is transforming the work we're doing.

But I think that test case is going to be really interesting.

Fantastic.

You talk about legacy systems. It's hard to do that globally in one go, not least because of legacy systems.

Yeah, I remember the conversation with Charlotte very well. Her whole approach was based around a small pilot programme — learning the process and being comfortable with trial and error — but getting to a point of discovering what works before scaling.

So presumably you're taking a similar approach.

Exactly that. A pilot programme is the right way to do it.

No matter what has happened in another asset management firm, we're all a little bit different. So it's important to see whether that pilot will work for your particular sales team.

Often marketing people assume the sales team want more leads. I've produced leads for salespeople and put them on their desk and they've said, great leads Neville, thanks — I'll get to those one day.

They never do.

I really should have asked first: if I gave you a hundred leads, how would that help you? Would you actually be able to do something with them given how busy you are?

And sometimes they'll say, let's talk about those leads.

That’s fine because then I can take those leads back into the marketing world and continue nurturing them until they are ready to pass on to sales.

Do you see lead generation in two ways — in-person sales leads for higher tier clients versus digital leads that might be higher volume?

Probably the latter. Nurturing prospects digitally until they're ready to be handed over to the sales team.

Impax is largely an institutional asset manager. We deal with professional investors, so relationships matter.

When large amounts of money are being invested, clients want to talk to someone. They want to meet portfolio managers.

Not everything can happen digitally in the institutional space.

I know diversity and inclusion are very important to you and something you believe passionately about.

How do you go about promoting that within marketing teams?

Let me start with the why.

In this industry, particularly in asset management, we're all trying to outthink each other.

Marketing teams try to outthink other marketing teams. Investors and portfolio managers try to outthink the market.

You can't really outthink the market if the people you hire come from the same backgrounds, the same schools and universities, with the same degrees and the same ways of thinking.

If you want diversity of solutions, you need diversity of people.

You need to look across humanity and access talent pools that aren't being accessed right now.

That's why I think it's important.

Personally I can influence marketing teams and my own team.

But the industry also needs to do more.

For example, Citywire data shows that around twelve point one percent of portfolio managers are female across twenty five thousand funds.

That's a pretty low figure.

Half the world is female.

That's a lot of talent we're missing out on.

When I speak to recruiters they say they're simply hiring the people in front of them and trying to be fair.

But the outcome is still skewed.

Unless we believe men are genetically better at managing money — which I don't — then something else must be happening.

We have the brains in this industry to solve complex problems. We should be able to figure out how to access the talent we're missing.

That applies to women, to people of colour, to people from working-class backgrounds.

Social mobility is important to me as well.

Why is that particularly close to your heart?

I came from a typical immigrant background. My mother came here in the sixties with four pounds in her pocket. I only found that out recently.

A few years later she was living in a council flat and brought up my brother and me there.

So it wasn't necessarily a background that leads easily into finance.

But society helped us along the way, and if I can help others in a similar way then that's important.

Thinking about listeners who might be early in their careers, what advice would you give them?

Let me think about the attributes I look for when hiring.

Obviously someone bright and energetic who wants to work in marketing.

But I'm often looking for detectives.

In large organisations it's not easy to know who does what.

At PwC there were over a hundred thousand people.

You need to be a bit of a detective — asking questions, finding out who can help you, navigating the organisation.

That detective mindset is important.

Professional curiosity is also important.

Don't just accept what's in front of you.

Ask questions. Why is that on the website? Why do we present that information that way? Why do other asset managers do it differently?

There might be a good reason — but ask.

That curiosity really helps people succeed.

I've got one last question.

I've heard you talk about presentation training and the moment of truth.

Presentation is often the moment of truth in the institutional world.

Marketing can build brands and bring clients down the buying funnel, but eventually the asset owner sits down with the portfolio manager and asks them to explain the portfolio.

That's crunch time.

I don't overtrain our portfolio managers.

My advice is simple: be authentic.

Be sincere and be yourself.

Impax scores highly on authenticity and I don't want to lose that by putting spin on top.

But I do advise focusing on what the client wants to hear.

Before the meeting, the salesperson should ask the client what matters most.

Then the meeting can begin with that topic.

If they're interested in risk controls, start with that.

That makes the meeting meaningful.

And it shows respect for their time.

Exactly.

And on that note, what a great way to end our conversation.

That was such an insightful chat, Neville. Thanks so much for coming in.

It's been a pleasure to be here.

I've got lots of notes and I'm sure our listeners will find it incredibly valuable.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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