Building on the inflection point of 2023, 2024 has become a pivotal year for U.S. asset managers and their marketing leaders to navigate growth in AUM beyond market gains. As a result, we’re experiencing a surge in demand for new narratives, messaging strategies, and value propositions as firms face these challenging market conditions.
Morningstar’s Q3 2024 U.S. Asset Managers Industry Pulse study shows that revenue growth and profitability, for many, are recovering alongside rising AUM levels. But the challenges of interest rates, the ongoing value battle between active and passive management, sluggish distribution, and stifled growth are still causing concern within the industry. With key stakeholders pushing for AUM growth beyond market performance, many firms are developing new bigger and more distinctive stories to offer something more compelling to their customers.
Moving away from outdated positioning
CMOs in the investment space are reevaluating and fine tuning their corporate, investment capability, and product narratives. Their goal? To sharpen differentiation and create clear, persuasive reasons for institutional clients, financial advisers, and individual investors to engage with their firm.
The biggest challenge we’ve seen is the need to move quickly in shifting away from long-established, often outdated positioning to a more contemporary and relevant market proposition. Some of our largest global clients—managing > $1.0 trillion in assets—have already made this transition, and many more are in the process.
However, some firms are hedging their bets on whether they move with the changing landscape, leaving their growth in the hands of market gains.
CMOs are not just pushing for a dive into corporate or investment narratives—they’re also focusing on refining the messaging and propositions around their capabilities, asset class offerings, and even specific products. Their aim is to better highlight and detail their unique points of value, built upon uncovered and distilled proof points, ones that resonate with institutions, advisers and their clients in today’s market.
Your story belongs to your whole business
In our experience, the journey hinges on fully involving and embracing key stakeholders and listening to their voices. By digging deep within the firm, we uncover authentic and differentiating stories. Powerful and engaging insights often emerge from across the business, not just the leadership or distribution teams. We involve analysts, portfolio managers, and operational teams who frequently articulate the vital proof points that help identify and validate the uniqueness of the firm, its capability or products. Whether the narrative is corporate-level or product-specific, engaging the right internal voices makes a huge difference in defining the difference as well as the vital adoption of any new story.
It’s easy to spot firms that have taken shortcuts in this process – these often end up being narratives that lack impact, as they are built around already known and existing belief systems based upon the past. Such stories fail to move the conversation forward, offering only a temporary boost and failing to escape from the land of proposition homogeneity – delivering no lasting impact upon growth, results or ambitions.
Strategic partners with the expertise to collaborate deeply with both investment teams and the broader business are few and far between. Such partners can uncover the true differentiators that stand out, above others, in a crowded market.
Finding the right partner
As one of the few sector-focused specialists truly capable of guiding U.S. and global asset managers through this process, we’ve seen a marked increase in demand for our strategic narrative and positioning solutions over the past 18 months.
What is evident to us is that this trend isn’t slowing down – with the landscape constantly changing, so is the desire of asset management marketers to move with the times.
Global markets demand new and continually progressive stories. Investment CMOs and their teams are ready for change, and we’re here to help move the conversation forward.
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