Own the "colouring in" label. If marketers are dismissed as decoration, that's on them. Earn credibility by being commercial, not by complaining.
Be a business person first. Read income statements. Understand how PMs build strategies. Without that, there's no basis for prioritising anything.
Brand is everything, not just the wrapper. A typo on page two tells a CIO you're careless with detail. Are you careful with their money?
Give before you ask. True of client relationships and careers alike. Create value first. The return follows.
More on our guest
Malcolm Fried
We’re joined by Malcolm Fried, Chief Marketing Officer at Ninety One. Previously CMO at Investec, Malcolm oversaw the transition of Ninety One as it demerged from Investec in 2020.Today,
Malcolm is responsible for leading Ninety One’s global marketing efforts across investment marketing, brand, marketing operations, digital strategy and corporate communications.
Welcome to the Growth Engine podcast. In today's episode, I'm delighted to be speaking with Malcolm Fried. Malcolm is the chief marketing officer at Ninety One, a role he has held for nearly three years. Prior to this, Malcolm was at Investec in the same role and oversaw the transition of Ninety One as it demerged from Investec in twenty twenty.
In his role, Malcolm is responsible for leading the firm's global marketing efforts across investment marketing, brand, marketing operations, digital strategy, and corporate communications.
Malcolm, thanks so much for coming down. Agreeing to have a chat, coming on the podcast.
When we set up this podcast originally, the reason for setting this up was that I've been working in marketing and financial services for a number of years, and I and I kept coming across this disparaging term of marketing as the coloring in department. Right.
Yes.
I thought think that that is pretty disrespectful to the quality of the individuals that are working department. And I just to kick us off, I just wanted to to ask if you've ever come across that term yourself and what yeah. What you think of that?
I have come across that term, and I hear it when I go to conferences. Yes. And I hear lots of agonizing about it.
And I do have a view on that term. And and here here it is. Here we go. I should think that term, in my experience, having heard my colleagues, is used in at least two ways or for two reasons.
One reason is because we as marketers, if we're called that, haven't shown what we can actually do. We haven't earned the right to be known as more than coloring in specialists. And the other reason may be that in certain firms which are not marketing led, for example, services, there is just an inherent misunderstanding or insufficient appreciation for what marketing can and should do. We should actually own this problem.
It's no good complaining that we're known as coloring in specialists.
You gotta earn the right not to be known as a coloring in specialist at non marketing led organizations. If I'm working for a luxury fashion brand, which is marketing led, or a whiskey brand, which is probably marketing led, or led by somebody who has a keen appreciation for marketing, it is unlikely that that firm would use a derisory or dismissive term for its marketers. Sure. If I'm working for a nuclear power station or an investment manager where most of my colleagues do not understand marketing and nor should they.
There's no reason why they should. I think it's my obligation to show what marketing can do and the value it can add and get rid of that label. So, you know, when colleagues say, oh, you know, woe is me. Why are we called coloring in specialists?
I'd say, you know, own the problem for the most part. Own it and fix it.
Yeah. Reminds me of a book that I'm reading, a guy by a guy called Shane Parrish called Clear Thinking. He writes a blog called Farnam Street, fantastic blog. And he mentions in there, if you've got a criticism, take ownership of it. If you don't take ownership of it, you're never gonna hope to solve the problem itself. So accepting responsibility initially is the starting point.
You talk about industries which are marketing led, but you implied, I think, that investment management can't be marketing led or aren't marketing So let me explain what I mean by that.
Typically, at the head of an investment management company, you would not find a former marketer.
No. Okay.
You would find a former portfolio manager, or you'd find a former head of sales and distribution, probably, or somebody who has moved from one of those areas to the other. What you'd be unlikely to find is a former CMO. Okay. For a lot of very good reasons.
It's a highly technical industry that requires a very deep product and environmental knowledge. So you're unlikely to find that former CMO. CMO or a marketer should know a great deal about product, price, place, promotion. Yeah.
But in the course of that person's career, they will unlikely have been able to acquire sufficient knowledge of portfolio management because they won't be doing it. They won't be running money.
Sure.
Sure. Or large sales and distribution. That's what I mean.
Yeah. Okay.
I don't mean a market is forbidden from leading that company. There may be examples and there may be some very good examples, but they'd be the exception.
Yeah. I wonder if that's the current status now, but I did read of a head of distribution for a global asset manager that are changing their their view was that the nature of distribution now is is changing, and that actually sales and marketing are coming much more entwined. Yeah. And that they're changing head of distribution to head of client experience. Yep. So I wonder if in time, ten years down the line, actually, you may maybe you will get people that are starting to take that model.
I guess, you know, we do see that model where and I know it's a debate that comes in ebbs and flows, you know, should marketing and sales be in the same, if you like, bucket? Yep. Should they be led by the same individual? Should they be combined? Some think yes. Some think no.
To me, it makes perfectly good sense to have client group
Which is led by a distribution specialist, part of which is marketing. Yeah. And that is my firm. I'm very comfortable in that space. What we don't have is a combined sales and marketing team.
Okay.
Sales works with marketing. It's not combined combined with marketing. It's not the same team.
If we talk about ninety one now and the and the and the structural setup there, I believe you you you work hand in hand with the CCO.
So the CCO is my boss. The chief commercial officer is my The group I work with pretty closely would be the client group MDs, the heads of each regional area, the heads of UK, US, Asia Pac, South Africa, etcetera. So that's a model where I, as the head of marketing, work most closely with the heads of the regional distribution teams. Okay. And our joint boss is the chief commercial officer, whose boss in turn is the CEO.
Okay.
And then under under you, you've got a team of about seventy About seventy people.
Most of us operate with a global remit. We we about a third of us are in Cape Town. About most of the rest of us are in London.
We all work on global work. So wherever we sit regionally, we work on global work.
Okay. We know that they don't do coloring in.
No. We don't. Look, I I think the coloring in, if we can get back to that, because it's a thing. It's a thing with marketers.
It upsets us sometimes and it shouldn't. If we just try and define what coloring it is. Yeah. We can just go back dial back to those four P's that we operate with.
It's not product.
It's not price.
It's not place. It's part of promotion. And one suspects it's that corner of promotion that is occupied with visual identity in advertising and commerce. That's the coloring in bit.
That's important.
And it's not everything. I should think it occupies half of one day a month for me. But that half of one day is important and we paid careful attention. Yeah. But it's certainly not the predominance of what we do.
No. But it's It's not. It's probably the visible aspect which is surface to the world. Is right. Yeah.
Where we where we run into the thicket is when we pay too much attention to it and aren't commercial enough about it Yeah. I think. So if we create inadvertently or deliberately a perception that the coloring in or the visual identity and comms is the predominance of what we do and we aren't being commercial about the other three and a half Ps Yeah. We create for ourselves a problem. Because then genuinely, you know, a colleague will say, you know, why are you spending so much time on creating a set of comms, a set of above the line retail ads when you could be devoting eighteen days to doing a deep piece of original research that will result in a white paper that our clients could really read. I think that's where we need to own that and try and avoid that problem.
Dr. Don't open yourself up to criticism really, I guess.
Yeah. Kind of be commercial, add value. Think our attitude is people in the business first and market a second. If we have that approach, that forces us to be commercial about what we do.
Yeah. If we see ourselves as marketers and nothing else, we run the risk of being the coloring in people. Yeah. Or the people who are disconnected from the business.
Okay, so be commercial. Can you unpack that more for me?
Yeah, sure. So it requires a couple of things first.
A few things. One is to understand how we make a living. To be numerate. Yeah. Internally to figure out what it is that lets the firm succeed and what it is that holds up success.
To be able to do such things as read and understand an income statement, to understand how our colleagues, the PMs, build their businesses, to appreciate how the products are structured, what goes into the strategies, really deeply to understand the business. That's number one. In order to aspire to being commercial, that's number two. On the other side of the equation, to understand what clients want and need. As marketers, we should be doing that.
And we feel if we can get that right, really deeply understand what we do for a living and how we do it well, understand what clients want and need, it lets us prioritize what we're doing well.
Absent that understanding, I'm not sure any marketer can go about their work effectively because how would you have a priority list? How would you know what to do first? Or how would you know how to clear your day or your week?
So two parts there in in essence is is bit to to being commercial. One, understand how the business makes money.
What is you know, what what keeps the lights on, so to speak. And then secondly, what do our clients want? So it's the first part there. How do you go about doing that? You've gotta be naturally curious within the within your within yourself in life in order to be kind of a bit of get up and go to go and do But with ninety one, do you take people along? Do you help them on that journey at all?
Or are you expecting them to kind of Oh, that's a great question.
That's a really good question. I think each firm is idiosyncratic. There'll be firms that have very structured training programs. Yeah. Where you're either obliged to attend everything or you're encouraged to do so, but there'll be a very structured process. That's probably in our industry the minority.
Okay.
For the most part, including at my firm, what we try and do is hire people who are insatiably curious about the world internally and externally, who really want to learn for its own sake, who have an intuitive, innate understanding that unless you learn and unless you're motivated to learn, you're not gonna go a very long way. Yeah. Okay. So then how do you do it? We value two things above everything else. One is performance and the other is relationships, equally so.
It is for each of us to create those relationships. So if if I need to understand an investment strategy, it's really for me to make it my business to speak to the the portfolio managers, the portfolio specialists, the investment director, everybody concerned with that strategy so I can suck it up. Yeah. Because there there there are just so many minutes in a day. We don't have the time No. To set aside large hour, two, three, four hour blocks to have teachings and university Yeah.
I see. So it essentially, it's higher, the right the right type of character Yeah. More that fits with what the culture of the firm is.
More or less.
Get that right and then. Yeah.
Yeah. So we wouldn't have people who would lean back, be passive. Yeah. Wait for somebody to come and tell them everything. There's a there's a place for most of us in the world. Yeah. And I'm I'm not judging, but that's not us.
No.
We tend not to have those people.
Okay. So that's the first part. Understanding the the the business, how it makes money. The second part, understanding what clients are wanting.
Is there anything you can tell me about the the way that you you approach that as an organization?
I'll tell you the way we don't approach it is by Googling. Right. And by spending too much time sitting down at the desk because you tend to learn very little that way. The best way to approach it is by quizzing sales colleagues.
Yeah. By meeting clients, by getting out into the world, by attending pitch sessions, by asking tons of questions. Yeah. Travelling a little bit.
Yeah. What underlies all of that is asking tons and tons of questions.
Yes.
Again, it's kind of going back to that curiousness, isn't It really is.
Yeah. I think I shan't speak for colleagues but honestly I think where we run into trouble is where we assume. Where we assume anything.
Doctor.
Yeah. Doctor. Absent qualitative or quantitative data, absent anecdotal fact, absent meeting somebody and asking a question, sitting there and making an assumption, almost always leads to a terrible outcome. Yeah. Almost always.
I was reading an article by, you've probably heard of him, I'm sure, Mark Ritson. This isn't what you're talking about, just to clarify. He was talking about any organization isn't spending minimum of five percent of its marketing budget on research is just, you know, going backwards, essentially.
I know you're not talking about specific research. You were talking about just actually also being on the ground speaking to customers. At ninety one, do you conduct research in in in conjunction with that? And then would you agree with the within investment management whether that level of percentage of research is enough to be truly understanding your clients and the changing demands that they have?
I may have read that article as well. I'm unable to put a percentage figure on it. I I shouldn't prescribe to everybody what percentage they should be doing.
I would think it would be completely insane Yeah. To proceed with any kind of marketing without any research. I don't know how that's possible.
Nice.
It's not possible to identify and build your segments without research. It's not possible to build great content without research. It's not possible to track the perception of the brand without research. So if we're not doing it, I'd have to say, you're just blundering your way through the world. What are we doing?
So actually but when you say it like that five percent seems quite low doesn't it?
So it may be. So there may be. You know we all as marketers we operate on a huge spectrum. Some marketers have a great deal in common with others.
Some have almost nothing in common with us. I mentioned high fashion luxury goods. I have very little in common professionally with those marketers. What I do have in common, I would think, is that we both understand how we're doing and what we should be doing and how we're being perceived.
And unless we're asking others in a methodologically sound way, a robust way, we're never gonna know. We can't deal with dipstick or anecdote.
No. Just now, you talked about the, the four p's of marketing, the kind of four, pedestones. That's good marketing strategy is formed from understanding how those elements work together for your individual business. So do we think that strategy or the the the the beginnings, the foundations of marketing for organizations stem from those?
So there's similarities there, but then when you get into the actual tactical execution, is that where the differences start to change?
I think across the whole spectrum, if one considers the four p's, and I know the p's kept being added to, I think there may be seven now including physical evidence, etcetera. I think they get different weight depending on where we sit. Yeah. In which organization we sit.
If I'm working for an airline and marketing an airline, I may give I may give outsized weight to elements of promotion, place. Yeah. As a marketer for a big airline, I also may occupy myself a great deal with pricing. Yeah.
I myself, sitting in marketing for an investment management firm, do not occupy myself a lot with pricing. There's a pricing forum.
There's a pricing committee, as there is at pretty much every investment management firm.
There are a number of variables, but that is not foremost in my mind. So I think that's what I mean. I don't mean that we don't receive similar training at the outset, That we don't respect the value of an MBA, for example. But when we get into the job itself, I think we have to calibrate depending on the kind of work we're doing.
Okay. Should I ever be marketing, which I never will be, an FMCG product I'd certainly have to approach that role differently. Yeah. I'd have to spend, I imagine, time on merchandising.
I'd have to understand packaging.
I have to understand where it sits in the shelf. Yeah. There's not a lot I can do about pricing in that case because the price is the price.
Continuing this theme then of what you don't spend time on, as much time. In order to be a CMO of an investment management firm, what do you need to excel in, in your role individually?
What we need to be distinctively good at, and where we need to be differentiated in the discretionary area. I'll explain what I mean now. Is what we do has two areas. If you like the regulated mandatory area and the discretionary area.
The regulated mandatory area is content that we produce that we have to produce because we're a highly regulated industry. Sure. Client reporting for example. Yeah.
Alright?
That has to be produced to a top level standard, and we have to do it. We then have quite a large area of discretion where we produce, for example, very deep research, white papers and the like.
It's there that when we're doing well, we really serve the firm. If you're saying to me, what do I need to focus on in respect of investment marketing, Yeah. What I really need to pay the closest attention to is the work that distinguishes and differentiates us in a very, very difficult market. Okay. We're producing content for people with a great deal at stake. They're managing or allocating hundreds of billions of dollars and pounds.
They are very bright. They are extremely discerning. We have to create the kind of content that is not just going to get their attention in a very, very busy world.
But when it's doing really well, it's going to challenge what they think. And sometimes even change their ideas. Now it's really hard to do.
Dr. Absolutely.
You can imagine. I mean, who's reading this? It would be a chief investment officer, it would be a central banker, clients at that level. And that's hard to do. So that's where, if you like, I have to pay a lot of attention, and my colleagues as well.
That's very, very powerful when you think about, essentially, there what we're talking about is is content, but it's communications, same wrapped together.
But the but the the impact of the the potential effectiveness of that could divert capital, large sums of capital going from one place and the CIOs may have made a mind up about placing and then diverting it into another area.
Well, you know, so more or less.
So if it's really, if that, and I almost don't want to say content because it sounds like it doesn't do justice, what we're trying to produce are original, exceptionally well founded and distinctive arguments and cases about such things as emerging market debt that we can put in front of a capital allocator and she would find it that compelling that she would be happy to have another conversation with us that could lead to a chain of events that in due course might even lead to her considering giving us a mandate.
That's what I'm talking about.
Nelson Okay. Dr. It's that step that is so important. Why? Because if we get it right, it could help trigger a happy chain of events.
If we have a spelling mistake on page two, she will rightly think we are negligent fools. Because if you can't be bothered to check the spelling Yeah. In a forty page document, no matter how good the argument, that says a great deal about you and the brand. You're not careful.
And if you're not careful with spelling, are you gonna be careful with money?
Yeah. Right?
Yeah. That's how important it is.
The attention to detail when you're dealing at that type of It really is.
I have enormous respect for colleagues in other industries, marketers in other industries. In in ours, it's that attention to detail in all things that can make a tremendous difference to how we are perceived. I'm not just talking about spelling and syntax and language and grammar. I'm talking about every piece of data we use.
The material that we produce and present to the world is is very data heavy. We can't afford to make mistakes there either. Which is why a lot of my my colleagues in the marketing team are are numerate. They're financial qualifications.
If you're mathematicians, we've got a couple of youngsters who are graduates in chemistry. Why? Because they really have to understand the numbers.
This is in them in your marketing team, you're Right.
In fact, the newest member of our marketing team has just now passed his level one chartered financial analyst exam, which is quite tough to pass.
Yeah.
Why? Because he really needs to understand the content. We all do.
I'm gonna slightly rewind to a couple of sentences ago. You're talking there about, well, in in the context of the the the typo on in a forty page document.
And your meaning behind that, I I believe was that the client perception of based on the evidence of the either the quality of the the document that they're reading or the lack of Yes.
Is contributing to the perception of the quality of the service that they may they may find Completely. What we're unpacking there is is brand experience Yep. To coin the marketing term that's closely to align to the bringing back to us to coloring in. It strikes me that brand in investment management does mean something slightly different within again, going back to our luxury goods product.
I I wonder if I could pull more thoughts from your Sure.
So many of us use the word brand to mean lots of things. Some of us will say brand, and we will be referring to the external circuitry of comms advertising.
That wrapping that is put around the goods or services. Fine. I'm not gonna quibble with that.
I don't let us internally talk about brand that way. The way we talk about brand internally is the sum literally of everything we say and do at that firm. That is the brand. Now, there'll be people who differ and that's fine. But that's the way we refer to it. Why? Because the way we write, the way we present, every deck, every chart that we produce, every social media post, we'll do one of two things.
It will either build our brand or it will break it down. It's pretty binary. If it's top class, interesting, differentiated, and engaging, it will build the brand. If it's not those things, it will break the brand down because you'll come away from it thinking only good or bad, useful or not useful. And if it's mainly not useful, we are going to crack that brand.
The problem is they move at different speeds.
Building takes far slower than breaking it It certainly does. That the you know, that that is that is that is the nightmare scenario, of course.
Yeah.
Which is why the detail is so critical.
In in ninety one, do you control the brand? Or is is the brand referred to and owned and controlled by everyone within the organization?
Oh, it's every it's it's every person who works there. So what marketers certainly would regulate and control would be those technical elements of visual identity, the brand book, if you like, the color palette. We're pretty fastidious about that. The way the logo is used, how we present the lockup, and so on.
That's the half day a month, if you like.
Yep. Yep.
So we but we are fastidious about that. I'm not talking it down. It's terribly important.
Yeah. Yeah.
Absolutely. It's completely within the control Completely. Dr. The creative services group in marketing, one hundred percent. But we have a very profound belief that every human being at that firm has to help enhance the brand because we all are. It's just pretty simple. We've got, in South Africa, colleagues who deal with retail clients often on the phone.
They have a brand responsibility. Yeah. Don't answer the phone quickly if you don't give good service, good advice, help the client.
Client leaves the phone call thinking that was a good call. We have not done well.
It's again interesting to think about, because this in terms of investment management, because when you speak about brand in that terms, of course, it's literally every single touch, but it's not necessarily even what you are doing. It is, but it's the the most important thing is the client perception of you. It's that recognizing that the perception is what you're building and everything that goes in towards towards that. So that links me into the Kantar report I mentioned about the organizations that have the most valuable brand assets are the ones that deliver the most superior shareholder returns, more resilient in times of downturn.
Presumably, all of this stuff you would agree with because if you're not paying attention to it, then clients aren't gonna trust you with the management of their money.
So I would. I mean, you know, should the measurement be the totality of the service, the experience, the performance?
Absolutely agreed. Yeah. Where I don't align with measurement of brand just because it's not useful to us is where we're measuring just a piece of the comms. No. Or where we're trying to understand the wrapper.
That's not useful to us. Why is it not useful? Because that's not the way we're trying to build our business. That doesn't help us.
Dr. Can you talk about what you do use at Ninety One to measure the marketing performance?
Dr. Firstly, we acknowledge we can't measure everything. So we're relaxed about that. We have live dashboards. They're probably forty different screens which measure everything from how many clients are opening emails in an email campaign to their click throughs to the website, to how much time they're spending on the website, to using AI to understand where their eyes are falling Yeah. And predicting where their eyes will fall, to then understanding whether there are follow-up engagements after that With our people. This is in the advisor retail space.
We measure perception of ninety one in the market as well, quarterly, which assists us.
It's a very long list. Some of these metrics help us. Yeah. And honestly, some of them over time are just occupational therapy and we stop doing that. Yeah. Okay. But we try and measure as much as we can.
What are the ones that are going, is the business going in the right direction and is the marketing actually contributing?
There's a really good indicator for that which is commercially how well we're doing. That's the best metric we Yeah. From marketing, if you like, there isn't a metric which is commercially how is the business doing. Commercially, we know how the business is doing because we know what's coming in.
Yeah. We know how we're performing. That that is the best metric we have. Those marketing measurements and metrics we have would measure what we as marketers are doing and perception of the business and understanding of client engagement with the business that we'd have.
Okay. But that commercial metric really is all the financials. That's the financials of the business itself.
I'm ask you another question here.
It's actually linked to another project I've been working on recently, which is around the importance of intergenerational mentorship. And my question is, as a CMO, operating at the highest level within the business and and reporting into the CCO of the business, there's a lot of pressure to always have the answers. But there must be elements of in your role and especially the stuff that's coming up within your role where there are perhaps weaknesses within your or gaps within your knowledge base. And that is where perhaps things like intergenerational mentorship can play a play a part. I'm I'm curious about what are those what might those things be that you're like, you know, I'm not too sure about this. And I I I do need support in in my role. These are the things that I'm curious about that I have to learn as a CMO, my role.
So is there anything you could Honestly, most of the day, I I just have questions, and I don't have answers.
And genuine That's very honest. Most of the day, I I'm wondering what I'm wondering how to approach something. Yeah. So I'm spending a lot of time asking people who work with me how they would do it.
Yeah. Not just because I'm trying to make them feel good, but because I genuinely don't know. No. Okay.
So, we have specialists in producing presentation decks and pulling in live data. We have specialists in research. We have specialists in RFPs.
We have specialist investment marketing writers. We have creative specialists.
Truly, most of their jobs, I could not do better than they do them. You have a limited number of jobs as you progress through your career. I haven't had all the jobs. Yeah. So I rely tremendously on the people I work with to help me make decisions. What I'm not saying is that there's a decision sclerosis. I think we make calls quite quickly.
Yeah.
But I am pretty happy to ask tons of people what they think Yeah. Before we make a call.
I guess that's also going that's in line with what you were saying is the culture of two one really, and and much in same way in that you hire curious people. It sounds like you're very curious individual yourself.
So I am curious.
And that's when we're at our best. So Yeah. When we're at our best, people should be very happy to tell colleagues they are right or wrong, certainly including me. I would expect any colleague at any level in the organization to tell me if they think I'm wrong, but tell me why Yeah. And give me a solution. That's when we're doing really well. I think, you know, we've got to avoid those moments where it's top down, one person making a decision, because truly that tends not to have the best outcomes.
Thinking about in terms of listeners going forward, not at CMO level, but are aspiring or aspiring senior roles, what advice to to individuals both that are operating within investment management firms, but equally in in roles within broader financial services?
What what would be your kind of advice to How to get there?
Yeah. And approach it in the same way that we would approach a prospective client, which is give more than you take.
Give more than you take.
Earn it. Yeah. Just earn it. I'll tell you a few things that really don't land with me well. And I very, very seldom get it these days.
It would be somebody saying, I need to know my career path. Just map it out for me. Or saying, quite soon into a new role, what's next for me?
Or saying, when do I get an increase? It feels like I've been on the same for too long.
It's the difference between doing something and prompting in the mind of your boss or your manager or the chief executive a notion that, wow, there's been such incredible delivery here that when something opens up, that person has got to be rewarded.
That and the notion in the mind of the same person that, oh my God, every time I hear from this person, it is a demand for something new.
Yeah, yeah.
So back to the first statement, earn it. Do a lot. Give a lot genuinely. I absolutely profoundly believe that when that happens, good things happen.
Yeah, yeah. Good things happen. As long as it's not a venal organization or a place which is just jobs for pals, and there are very few of those in my experience. Give a great deal, ask for nothing.
Yeah.
And you will get a lot because the value will be palpable. That that's my generic advice for what it's worth.
It matches with exactly as you say. So in in my notes previously, you you said, but you're talking in in these terms of the the work of the research writing, talked about planetary pulses as being example, giving something that clients completely value. And you mentioned create the value and then get the value in return.
Well, we might be. So we say what are what are we here to do as marketers? We're here to help create relationships of value with clients, which means first we as marketers have to give the value.
If we even hope to have a conversation which may lead to us getting some value from the client, it's on us to give the value first and not to ask. We know what it's like to be spammed with weird emails saying buy my product or somebody stops you in the street saying buy whatever or give whatever. It's annoying. Yeah. There's no relationship. That that that individual or that email hasn't earned my trust, hasn't gotten my attention, hasn't given me something that really sparks the synapses and makes me think, so why why would I give them the time of day? I wouldn't, and I won't.
Last question, just to wrap As the world of investment management starts to change and evolve, how from from your position, how do you see the nature of marketing evolving to keep up with those changes?
If marketers see themselves as part of the business first and then as marketers seamlessly. Seamlessly because they're part of the business. If marketers see themselves as marketers operating in the marketing department, royal game, untouchable, they'll be annihilated. Yeah.
So first order of business is to understand the business. Yeah. And be part of it. And earn the place in the business.
And then produce the kind of marketing that will support the growth, that will help the business find direction, that will help ensure the business is really well positioned, that will find the best ways to articulate that, then we're good. I think that that's to me is the best and only way, depending on how we see ourselves and how we behave.
Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking your time out and coming having a chat. I sit here, I've got another arm of questions, but I'll let you go. We've important important weekend for you in the rugby. So I wish you you and your team the best of luck cheering on for ninety one. Yeah. Thanks very much. Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks for the time.
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