INTERVIEW: Royal London Asset Management’s Marketing Director looks to make firm “future-fit”

Royal London Asset Management’s new Marketing Director has been focusing on getting the marketing function “future-fit” in her first three months in the job.

Kathryn Pinner, previously Head of Global Investments Marketing at abrdn and formerly at Aviva Investors and M&G, started the position in May. Her position sees her reporting to the Group Chief Marketing Officer, but also sitting on the leadership team of the Client Group at Royal London Asset Management.

Since then, she has been focused on understanding her team members and their strengths, as well as ensuring that their abilities are being deployed to best effect. Kathryn has now aligned her Marketing Executives to each Channel Marketing Manager with the goal of helping them develop their understanding of clients and their needs.

“I’m keen my team has the opportunity to gain depth of knowledge and understanding to best support our business and ambitious plans for growth,” she explains. “To do their best work, it is crucial they understand the context for it, and the why.”

She’s also made new hires and is looking at the firm’s martech stack, which she says was “not where it needs to be for us to be able to grow and develop at the speed we know we’re going to over the next couple of years”. The firm has reached a tipping point where more tasks need to be automated to achieve the necessary scale, while a new CRM is needed to make data more usable.

One area where the martech will be deployed is around content. Her goal is to build a content creation unit which will have conversations across distribution and marketing to determine not just core themes but also formats, segmentation models, journeys and structures.

“If content is pushed out within different channels, there’s the risk that messaging is not as consistent as it could be.

“We’ve got to get to ensuring the investment capability team determine what the messaging frameworks are, and then everything hanging off that so content can be created and given to the channels to disseminate. They can then tweak it according to their audience type.”

She says the firm currently has strong content but knows it can do more, because it lacks the technology capabilities to do so.

“It all loops back to stripping it back to basics. Let’s get a good content plan in place, and let’s get the martech in place to disseminate it effectively and build from there.”

More effective reporting, enabled by the developing tech capabilities, will help with this.

“Sometimes in the past we’ve done things and then not been able to get the right reporting in place. Then when you need to push back on something, you really need metrics to say that didn’t land very well and didn’t get as many views, in order to develop content further.”

Why Royal London Asset Management?

This content will support more foundational work on the Royal London Asset Management brand, which is part of the overall Royal London family but is also further developing its own distinctive identity in terms of look and feel.

“We’re fortunate that we’ve got some good products and good performance, but you can’t rely on performance,” she says. “So you have to make sure you build a really strong foundation around that so that if performance in any asset class drops, even slightly, you still have the ability to talk about yourself as a business and stay at the front of people’s minds.”

She references the 95-5 rule, which argues that while only 5% of potential customers are in the market for a product at a given time, marketers need to ensure their product is in their mind 95% of the time ready for when they are.

Right now, Kathryn says, Royal London Asset Management has a presence in the market and is seen as solid and trustworthy.

“Those are good attributes to have, but then we are digging a bit further. There’s not that kind of deep engagement with the brand. Our customer base trusts us, but if we asked them to name what our latest advertising campaign looked like it’s likely they couldn’t tell you.”

The goal then is to build the value proposition, defining the “golden nugget” of what makes the firm stand out – “why Royal London Asset Management?”

Part of this will be trying to bring a more emotive element to the brand.

“It’s a very fine balance, because if you go too far on the emotive piece, it feels very retail. Actually, our audience is B2B, but we’ve got to get a real balance.”

She says trust is a good basis on which to build, but she wants to go beyond this to having people as “advocates”.

“They need to be able to tell the story very simply about why Royal London Asset Management– that’s the work we’re doing now.”

The broader group, she says, has done a good job on this with the mutual mindset, recent brand work and broader sponsorship opportunities. She expects part of the mix for Royal London Asset Management to be its own sponsorship programmes, including in Europe.

The framing of the master brand ladders down from Royal London’s overall purpose statement: “Protecting today, investing in tomorrow. Together we are mutually responsible”. Its strapline, meanwhile, is “Mutuality – it’s everyone’s business”.

This then flows down to the strategy, how this is being executed, down to the positioning of being champions of the mutual mindset, followed by the values of collaboration and trustworthiness.

It is harder to channel this through Royal London Asset Management as the benefits of being a mutual are seen to be more for end investors rather than intermediaries or institutional investors. However, there are also benefits for B2B clients – the firm isn’t constrained by shareholders and hence doesn’t make short-term decisions based on dividend requirements.

“We are able to invest in our business for the longer-term view on the work we do and determine if things are the right thing to do for our clients and we can take the time to do that.”

A year from now, Kathryn says her main hope is to have built the content offering out more.

“This time next year the content plan will be well underway. Thought leadership is an area that we don’t actually feature in much at the moment and yet we have some great people here who’ve got some really good stories to tell.

“We’ll be delivering out into market and people will see Royal London Asset Management from both a brand perspective but also a content and thought leadership perspective.”