Advertising doesn’t work the way you think. You don’t see a glossily-produced, Nigella-worthy Lurpak advert and decide: “I will now only buy that Danish butter brand.”
Traditional advertising theory says we are rational beings with near perfect memories. But the reality is much of our thinking and decision-making is non-conscious and emotional. Our memories are also far from perfect.
That means advertising works in a subtle way. Watching beautifully shot videos of home cooks slinging butter into hot pans works by making us sub-consciously aware of brands so when we are standing in front of a supermarket shelf, we choose Lurpak.
Why should an asset manager care about Lurpak?
You’re probably wondering why an asset manager should care about Lurpak adverts. What lessons can an asset manager selling a highly complex financial product to an asset owner take from a butter brand?
Unlike consumer goods companies, much of financial services still thinks its audience are rational beings with perfect memory recall rather than messy humans who make non-conscious decisions based on emotion.
Rather than trying to bamboozle clients with data and performance statistics, we should be building emotional connections to harness the way humans build relationships and buy from individuals.
The reality of how humans make decisions meant building and maintaining brand recognition used to be an expensive exercise. Frequent distinctive print and broadcast ad campaigns were needed to hold onto buyers and give a brand a chance to grow its market share.
Today we have LinkedIn and email, making it much more cost-effective for asset managers to create client connection. And we can design bespoke in-person events to cement those relationships.
First things first
But before you think about sweating your LinkedIn membership and sending out more frequent emails, you must take the time to understand your clients.
Without knowing which client problems you can solve, your efforts at creating brand awareness will fail.
All too often asset managers think client connection is about talking about existing products and performance. Their communications are focused on them rather than their clients.
Take the time to determine which institutional client challenges you can solve and your strategy becomes clear – you know what you should write about in social media posts and emails. And you can then design effective in-person events to reinforce these connections.