Newton Investment Management’s Global Head of Marketing Ed Gore Browne talks through the firm’s recent brand refresh and what “unlock opportunity” really means.
FSF: How would you characterise the overall marketing strategy of the firm?
Ed Gore Browne: Our overarching marketing strategy at Newton is to build awareness and consideration of our evolved and distinctive proposition and capabilities across our direct and partnered markets, and to work in collaboration with our colleagues at Newton and in our parent company BNY to help win and retain business.
We’re not a new firm, having been established in 1978, but our recent growth, particularly in 2021 via the integration of the equity and multi asset-focused divisions of what was previously Mellon Investments Corporation, has significantly added to what we can do for clients, and therefore the story that we’re able to tell them.
Our marketing strategy, and our business strategy more broadly, are fuelled by a strong conviction about what it will take for asset owners and asset managers to thrive in the years ahead. We talk about being ‘expert partners’ to our clients, and that means first and foremost having a deep understanding of the context in which they operate.
Owing to a host of factors (economic, financial-market, societal and geopolitical), that context has clearly changed significantly over the recent past. The years ahead promise further change and disruption, and, as a result, old models, structures and assumptions are unlikely to work as they did.
It’s striking that, despite the central part investment plays in determining the real-world outcomes clients experience, asset managers have not traditionally ranked highly among the range of clients’ trusted advisers. That needs to change, but it can only change if we’re committed to building truly empathetic connections with clients.
As a marketing team, we look to innovate constantly to support that mission. That’s true of the impactful content assets we create to underpin our marketing initiatives, the toolkit we use to reach our target audiences, and the means by which we measure and optimise our return on investment.
Tell me about the thinking behind the ‘unlock opportunity’ refresh.
The key motivation for the refresh was the desire to go to market with an updated proposition about what we stand for and can offer clients as a result of the growth of our firm. Our previous brand messaging was unveiled on the same day that we announced the enlargement of the firm back in February 2021, and there have been some notable enhancements to our business since then.
Allied to that, we wanted to be unambiguous about the connection of our proposition with our clients. We know from our research over several years that it’s critical who we are and what we do is seen by our clients to be tightly aligned with solving the challenges they bring to us. That’s been at the forefront of our refresh, and in our change of brand strapline from ‘Invest with purpose’ to ‘unlock opportunity’.
I’m sure we’ve all read the less than complimentary studies that point to the homogenous language we in the asset management industry tend to use to try to describe ourselves. Our narrative discovery workshops with stakeholders across the firm have certainly pointed to the fact that being truly ‘unique’ in our industry sets a very high bar, but nonetheless we believe we have a distinctive story that’s highly relevant to the challenges our target audiences face.
In updating the external expression of our proposition, we’ve been helped significantly by the clarity our executive committee has provided in the form of an internal commercial blueprint that puts our client-focused purpose at the heart of our plans for success. ‘Unlock opportunity’ is intended to take the essence of that blueprint into an external setting, connect strongly with our clients and the goals they need to achieve, provide a simple call to action, and be an emotive and hopeful proposition.
Research shows that, across industries, sales narratives tend to be disproportionately logic-focused, despite the fact that buying decisions have a strong emotive element. Our proposition consciously establishes a ‘why’ before we go on to explain the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of our active, multidimensional and engaged investment approach.
In parallel with our brand refresh, our parent company BNY has been carrying out its own brand refresh – also with a clear focus on the ‘why’. This year, BNY marks 240 years of being at the forefront of innovating to support clients across the financial lifecycle, and its proposition that it “helps make money work for the world – managing it, moving it and keeping it safe” resonates strongly with Newton’s own proposition.
How did you implement the refresh, both internally and externally?
At the heart of the refresh is a content-led campaign. Our content assets include a two-minute brand animation, a 90-second film with our CEO, Euan Munro, which promotes a key thought leadership paper he’s authored, and a series of vox pops with a cross-section of 15 people from across the firm explaining very briefly what ‘unlock opportunity’ means to them. We’ve used all of those content assets extensively through paid and social media to build awareness of Newton, and they’ve been accompanied by Euan’s paper – ‘Facing the future: How can we unlock opportunity in a new market regime?’, as well as by a range of supporting materials. We’re releasing further thought leadership materials as the campaign evolves.
In terms of activation, we’ve exploited all of the tools at our disposal, including paid media (with a mix of programmatic and direct advertising) across our target channels. The first wave of advertising emphasised the importance of starting with client goals rather than benchmarks, with some playful ‘Don’t just keep up with the Dow Joneses’ copy and creative. In addition, we’ve been live with our campaign on LinkedIn via organic (including newsletter subscription) and paid activity, and we’ll continue to be active on social media – both as Newton and via executive committee and wider staff advocacy. We’ve also used significant email activity, and we’ve implemented search engine optimisation techniques to help drive success.
Within Newton, much of the language of our brand proposition had been well established already by our commercial blueprint and by our existing brand identity, but our refresh campaign has given us the chance to double down on the key elements of our brand narrative by linking them clearly to our headline ‘unlock opportunity’ appeal. In a practical sense, that’s involved the creation of internal sales aid materials to ensure consistency of brand messaging among all external-facing staff, the participation of key members of our staff in the recording of our brand vox pops (and the advance sharing of those with all of our staff), and the creation of new wall graphics around our offices.
As part of the implementation, we’ve also refreshed our creative identity more broadly. Gone is the stripped-back, black and white visual identity that we’d used previously to help us stand out from the crowd, and in its place is a new vibrant identity that exploits striking gradient colour schemes and crisp design vectors.
What obstacles did you face?
Perhaps the most important thing to get right – not necessarily an obstacle, but a key sensitivity to manage – was the language of our strapline itself. The notion that we use an active, multidimensional and engaged approach to try to help our clients overcome their challenges and achieve the investment outcomes that allow them to realise their ambitions remains very much intact, but the refresh gave us the chance to reconsider a strapline that had become capable of being misconstrued amid heightened debate about the role of the asset management industry.
We’d founded ‘Invest with purpose’ on the idea that successful investing starts with a client and the real-world things it needs to achieve from its investments; it sought to make the client’s purpose, not an abstract measure that wasn’t designed to fulfil it, the cornerstone of what we do for them. However, we’d identified a growing risk that in maintaining ‘purpose’ in our brand strapline itself (as distinct from having a strong sense of purpose and aligning it with our clients’ purpose), our proposition could be interpreted by a subset of our target audiences as being more narrowly focused than it was.
In order to ensure that we’re making an unambiguous connection of our proposition with our clients, we retired ‘Invest with purpose’ and replaced it with ‘Unlock opportunity’.
What results have you seen so far?
We’ve been in market with our brand campaign for three months, and we’re pleased to see plenty of green on our KPI dashboard!
Ultimately, the success of the campaign and our brand promotion more broadly will depend on tangible and lasting impact in core measures at each part of the funnel. We’ll be looking at preferred surveys of brand awareness and willingness to consider Newton, and as far as possible we’ll also be focusing on lead generation, conversion and retention given that our brand campaign will evolve into promotion of the strategies we manage for clients. Even in segments of our target markets where our legacy brand is strong, we believe there are significant opportunities for us to excite our audiences about expanded capabilities that they may not previously have associated with Newton. We refer to that as showing them ‘the other side of the mountain’.
In the near term, our KPIs are providing some leading indicators of our campaign success. Results have benchmarked well in terms of viewable impressions on paid and social media, brand animation views, click-through rates across all mediums, website traffic, LinkedIn followers and newsletter subscribers, and Google search visibility scores.
What are you most excited about over the next year?
I’m most excited about the scope we have to demonstrate our relevance in an investment environment that calls for fresh thinking and an innovative approach to helping clients solve their challenges. When we talk about taking a multidimensional approach to investing for our clients, we’re referring not just to a research platform that combines an unusually broad set of inputs, or to the diverse teams of experts that we’ve put together, but also to the solutions we develop for our clients. Some of those solutions involve the pursuit of alpha from a single strategy whose idea generation is fuelled by our multidimensional research; the multidimensional characteristics of others entail the use of a number of diversified alpha sources, often with a combination of fundamental and systematic capabilities.
As a marketing team at Newton, we’re fortunate that we can act as a mouthpiece for a firm that grasps the realities of the investment world as it is and will be, and won’t stand still as it innovates to address and capitalise on those realities for clients.
