You know your company is solving real problems, but your brand isn’t breaking through. Investors don’t grasp your value proposition fast enough.
Enterprise clients hesitate because they don’t fully understand what sets you apart. Your competitors—some with weaker offerings—are winning deals because they’ve nailed their positioning.
Your messaging is inconsistent across channels, leading to confused prospects and longer sales cycles. You’re spending money on marketing, but it’s not generating the right kind of inbound interest. You don’t just need more visibility—you need the right visibility with the right audience, and you need it sooner rather than later.
In this article, we’re going to aim to tackle at least 20% of that problem by showing you how to sharpen your brand strategy, make your value immediately clear, and ensure that the right people understand why they should choose you.
Before you can think about a brand strategy, make sure your asset management firm is legally allowed to do marketing and communications.
There’s a detailed section in this article outlining what types of firms and funds can market themselves. If in doubt, check with your regulator and lawyers.
For more information on the UK’s regulatory landscape, this article from The Hedge Fund Journal is worth reading.
For more information about U.S. regulations governing financial services marketing, this article is worth reading.
It’s always important to make it very clear that there are risks involved in investing and you are only offering information, not advice.
As is always the case with financial marketing: Legal boilerplate disclaimers that have been gone over in excruciating detail by your lawyers are your friend in this scenario!
Now, assuming you are allowed to do brand marketing, let’s dive into why this is an investment worth making.
The value of having a brand and creating a brand strategy
Having a brand strategy makes it easier to stand out and get noticed. The value of having a “brand” compared to simply marketing your company is financially quantifiable.
Think of your brand as another asset that you’re tasked with managing; the aim is to maximize your brand’s ROI.
For 25 years, Interbrand has published a ranking of the top 100 global brands in the world, and what those brands are worth. Since 2000, Interbrand has featured 185 brands, and yet, only 35 have stayed consistently in the table, with only 2 remaining in the top 10 every year: Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
One of the most interesting findings from Interbrand’s research is that: “Utilising our data from the last 25 years we see that a focus on operational efficiencies and short-term gains has cost the world’s most valuable brands $US 3.5 trillion in cumulative brand value since we started our study. This equates to approximately $200bn of lost revenue opportunity over the past 12 months.”
Brands harm their own value when they engage in short-term tactics that negatively impact customers and shareholder value.
Brand building is a long-term investment. Over time, building a strong, clear, positive brand far outweighs the initial and ongoing investment.
For asset management firms, this means that every interaction with investors, including communications and marketing, are building blocks in brand perception.
Let’s look at two examples from the global 100 list: Starbucks and Mastercard.
Why these two?
Both Starbucks and Mastercard are so well-known — their brand awareness is so strong — that taking their names out of the logos didn’t have a negative impact on the brand capital they’d both accumulated.
Starbucks took “Starbucks Coffee” out of its logo in 2011, on the 40th anniversary of its founding and launch.
Mastercard did the same in 2019.
The value of both brands is doing just fine, customers still know that a card is supported by Mastercard, and people can still spot a Starbucks a mile away without needing to be told it’s a Starbucks.
Mastercard is 39th in the top 100, worth $18.5 billion, and Starbucks is 52nd, worth $15.3bn.
This is because brand awareness is so much more than a mere logo, a name, or a colour scheme.
Everything that underwrites a brand strategy is hard-wired into your company culture, values, expertise, services, products, how you treat clients, staff, suppliers, and anything else your company does.
A brand strategy is and should be an outward reflection of your inner workings.
Let’s take a look at a brand strategy in action in the financial sector.
Monzo: An example of a masterful brand strategy in the financial sector
Like all challenger banks, Monzo had to move fast to establish trust. Trust is the most important asset in the financial sector, because without trust, people aren’t going to put their money into your hands.
Monzo crossed this crucial financial sector trust threshold very early-on, even before they were granted a full banking license.
Monzo broke records in 2016, for the “quickest crowd-funding campaign in history”, when they successfully raised £1 million in 96 seconds through Crowdcube, a crowd-funding platform.
Now, in 2025, Monzo has 11 million UK personal and business customers and is aiming to enter the US market. They’re also turning a £15.4 million profit for the last fiscal year (2023-24) after several steady years of growth.
Here is how they’ve achieved this using a masterful brand strategy:
Having the right Tone of Voice (ToV) for their brand and customers: Casual, informal, and user-friendly. Monzo went for the Millennial market. People in their 20s and 30s who were sick of traditional banks and wanted something more convenient, designed for them, and ideally app-based.
As part of that, Monzo has used storytelling well, based on their origins. Take a look at this messaging from their About page:
“We’re doing things differently. For too long, banking has been obtuse, complex and opaque. We want to change that and build a bank with everyone, for everyone.”
How they brand themselves leans into their values, mission, and unique selling point (USP). Monzo makes it clear that they offer banking that works for people, rather than banking that makes people work harder to get the service they need.
As a result, Monzo stands strong on their brand identity. Here is another example:
“By solving your problems, treating you fairly, and being totally transparent, we believe we can make banking better.”
Monzo knows their customers very well so every marketing asset, email, in-app copy, and social media message speaks directly to them. Monzo was founded in the wake of the global financial crisis when trust in banks was at an all-time low.
Even 10 years after it happened, 66% of UK consumers had limited trust in traditional banks. Monzo strategically appealed to Millennials by making their brand strategy and messaging focused on fairness and doing the right thing.
Everything from the visuals they use on their website and social media to the app user experience and the coral pink cards makes them stand out in a sea of sameness.
Banking regulators make UK banks ask customers if they’d “recommend their provider to friends and family”, and this is what people say about Monzo:
Monzo is rated first out of the 17 largest current account providers in the UK. They achieved a score of 80% for whether customers would refer them to friends and family. These results are from an independent survey carried out between July 2023 and June 2024 by Ipsos as part of a regulatory requirement.
As you can see, how Monzo presents itself reflects the experience and service provided. One must reflect the other for a brand strategy to work.
Why your asset management firm needs a brand strategy
Developing a brand strategy and with it the foundations of a strong brand-led marketing campaign makes it easier to stand out and get noticed.
Of course, attracting and winning new investors takes time. You need to give them good reasons and confidence that placing funds with your firm is a smart investment.
Having a brand strategy helps to get those funds over the line by demonstrating your expertise, strengths, and values.
A brand-led marketing campaign will help keep your firm’s name alive in the minds of potential investors so that when it comes time for them to make decisions on investments, they are much more likely to think of you.
Having a brand strategy and creating strong brand awareness has helped Monzo become a market leader amongst UK challenger banks.
Having a brand strategy is why Mastercard was confident enough to drop its name from the logo.
Making more people aware of your firm should be the end result of a brand strategy and everything that flows from the creation of one.
4 steps to develop a brand strategy
We are basing this on branding best practices and what we’ve done for other brands in the alternative asset space. Take a look at our case study about how we developed a new brand strategy for The Peachtree Group (with $10.3 billion in real estate assets) when they wanted to get into the EB-5 Visa space.
Developing a brand strategy is a 360 experience. You need to look inward as much as outward.
Everything that makes your firm unique is part of your brand strategy building blocks:
- Your team, talent, skills, and experiences;
- Your position in the market;
- Products and services, e.g., funds and assets under management ;
- Your origin story and subsequent growth;
- Your customers and stakeholders;
- Your values, mission, and unique selling point.
A brand strategy turns all of those into marketing, messaging, and visual guidelines that we use to accelerate the growth of your firm.
Because many asset management teams don’t have the time for the amount of work involved, it’s usually a smart investment to have an external team support you through this process and do the heavy lifting.
Here are the 4 steps we recommend undertaking:
- Competitor Analysis & Brand Audit
Competitor research gives you insights into how your competitor’s brands are positioned compared to your own. The following are useful to record and analyse:
- How the market perceives competitors: Old school, up-start underdog, reliable but unimaginative.
- Products and services competitors offer: Funds and vintages, assets under management, average returns, and the fees they charge.
- Reviews and case studies: What their customers say about them (even more insightful are any reviews you can find that a competitor hasn’t censored and edited).
- Marketing activity levels: Looking at what they’re publishing, how often, and how active they appear through digital channels, including PR and any advertising.
- Events and awards: It’s worth looking at whether they attend conferences, networking events, or sponsor any, and if they’ve won any awards.
Branding is more effective when you understand what your competition is doing and how the market perceives it. It gives you the ability to differentiate yourself, lean into your strengths, and make the most of what makes your firm unique.
Market perceptions of your firm could be worth leaning into. If you’re seen as a scrappy but impressive up-start underdog, then you might want to make the most of it. Or if you are known for being old school, reliable, and safe, then it may serve you best to use that too.
If a competitor is doing something you really admire, try to find a smart way to outdo them. For example: a competitor publishes unique research pieces every quarter, and this generates loads of press attention every time.
PR helps to keep their brand name at the top of search results. Backlinks from every press article boost a website’s search position relative to competitors. PR can also generate new sales leads, and contribute to a firm winning awards.
Combined, this activity helps a company win and maintain a strong brand position in the market, like Blackstone with its Pattern Recognition content series.
- SEO, Website Audit
Your website is an integral part of your marketing strategy. Think of it as your shop window. If no one can find it then it’s not serving its purpose.
Even if your potential customers can find you, if your shop window isn’t inviting they aren’t going to come inside and take a look.
An SEO audit is essential because it shows you:
- What ⏤ if any ⏤ technical fixes need implementing across your website. You might find there are reasons you haven’t been ranking in Google and other search engines, such as broken links, slow loading speeds, or your website not being mobile-friendly.
- Having a website that loads fast and is mobile-friendly is essential, otherwise, Google will penalize your site and de-list it in rankings. In other words, you will all but vanish in search results.
- Where your website currently ranks for any relevant keywords.
- If you’ve got any backlinks going to your website – the more you’ve got the better it is for bringing in web traffic.
- How search engines perceive your website, known as a domain authority (DA), and page authority (PA). These are ranked out of 100, so the higher the better.
- Internal Brand Workshop
For this part of the process, we recommend setting aside a day, even going off-site (or via video call if you’re working with an overseas provider), and being really honest with yourselves over the following questions:
- How have our marketing and/or sales efforts performed over the last 12 months?
- How do we think we are perceived by our customers and competitors?
- Have we done enough to stand out and get noticed (e.g., networking, events, video, social, or PR)?
- Are we happy with our website and current branding?
- What internal knowledge, insights, experience, or data could we leverage to create some stand-out content pieces?
- Customer/Investor focus group
Taking this a step further, you could also put together a focus group or an anonymous survey. Either internally or in collaboration with a branding studio, have questions put together that will help you understand your customer experience better.
Make sure the questions being asked are unbiased. This could be one of the most valuable parts of creating a brand strategy. If there are aspects of how you work with customers/investors that need to change then these insights will emerge from this step.
Once you’ve got all of this information and insights, then you can develop a brand strategy.
We will cover how you go about that in another article.
Key Takeaways: Why asset management firms need a brand strategy
Having a brand strategy — like every brand in the global 100 list, and Monzo, as we demonstrated — makes a difference to a firm’s revenue and profits.
A brand strategy — creating a unique brand voice — and using that voice to stand out in a crowded marketplace is worth investing in. Your firm is unique; a brand strategy takes everything unique about it and amplifies it so that more investors know you exist.
When your firm becomes more well-known, trusted, and respected, that will contribute to the growth you want to achieve over the long term.
Do you need help creating and implementing a branding strategy? Get in touch. We can help you.