This year’s branding must-haves?

Has the definition of brand values, by asset managers, been redefined by the recent crises to counter negative opinion from investor and public? Fin International’s Justin Mould suggests there has been a shift.
Within a number of recent brand definition projects for both small and large asset management firms we began to see a trend in how many internal stakeholders were responding to our questionnaire during the insight phase.
During the one2one qualitative interviews with the top table from within the firms, it became apparent that the negative events of recent years were playing heavily on how they presented the values of the organisation. Their goal, it seemed, became two fold: define what are their positive values in line with known peer positioning, but also ‘own’ the antithesis of any recent negative opinion on financial services.
Many senior stakeholders, to identify the values of the group, were defaulting to their key competitors – “something along these lines as they’ve come out of all this mess with a good reputation” – or the opposite as it became clear. Their goal: to achieve a presence of industry wide known positives with a counter to ‘bad-press’ negatives.
This prompted us to consider if the definition of brand values by asset managers have been redefined by the recent crises to counter negative opinion from investor and public.
We undertook desk research across the web sites of the top 50 global asset managers in 2014 as defined by Investment and Pensions Europe (based on AUM). This gave some interesting insight with a possible shift in the top five brand values.
To continue reading Justin’s insight and discover the top five brand values, please download the PDF document by clicking the link above.