Work

Smith & Williamson

Integrated Brand Campaign

The Problem
Launch Smith and Williamson into the retail asset management market in the teeth of a recession that has discredited the entire financial services industry.
Predatory Thought
Play on investors’ fears that poor fund performance may be because asset managers have been pushing what is acceptable practice.
The Idea

Challenger brands usually position themselves as younger, brighter and more innovative than their lumbering competitors. With Smith and Williamson we identified the opportunity for a less conventional approach.

At a time when many asset managers had been ‘burnt’ straying into areas that were not core (property, absolute returns), Smith & Williamson had stuck to their beliefs and principles and achieved good results.

We positioned Smith and Williamson as a challenger to the rest of the fund management industry. Visually dramatising the company’s distinctive, and arguably more conservative, stance as being more likely to deliver consistent investment performance.

The advertising needed to work hard to promote individual funds, but all communications are built around the simple message “Asset management as it should be”.

We involved the media publishers closely with the creative idea and worked with them on strategies to bring it to life. Citywire is the most important title for our audience. On the day the campaign launched, the magazine had a cover shot and a profile of David Cobb, CIO at Smith and Williamson. This ran alongside a double page advertisement in and a page takeover of their website.

Online we were able to introduce more information about the funds through factsheets and videos of fund managers. We have also built a new website for Smith & Williamson funds, this included a bespoke factsheet CMS driven PDF publishing capability.

The Results
In the first 3 months of the launch, sales targets were exceeded by 205%. The digital campaign produced click-through rates of up to 1.25% - nearly 10x industry average.

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