Top Performers Don’t Always Win

. . . a marketing and branding lesson to be learned from money managers.

There are thousands of organizations that provide investment advice to everyone from the smallest investor who wants to grow and protect their nest egg to corporate retirement funds where so much is at stake they hire institutional portfolio managers to manage hundreds of millions of dollars. These money managers all attempt to out perform the stock market. Obviously, some do and some don’t; and, the top performers beat the market by several percentage points on an annual basis.

This is where it gets interesting.

The top performer doesn’t always win the business of managing the money. If performance were the only measure, then ½ of 1% of all of the money managers out there would have all the money to manage. They don’t and here’s why.

Other factors enter into the buying and hiring decisions. What is their investment philosophy? What is their style, large or small, value or growth? What are the risk factors? How diversified is the portfolio? Where does service and reporting enter into the equation? What are the client needs? Answers to these questions plus some emotional factors enter into the decision making process. Good performance is only the price of entry.

The most successful money managers with large pools of assets under management have excellent track records plus offer great service, market knowledge, are very responsive to their investors and manage investor relations extremely well. If you are a marketer with a product that is out performing the competition and are not capturing the market share you would like, look beyond performance. Think about conducting a brand audit to determine how you compare to the competition beyond product performance.