There’s a lot of new at Nuveen these days. After TIAA acquired Nuveen in 2014, TIAA decided to adopt the Nuveen name for the company’s now $900 billion investment management unit. This sparked a massive rebranding effort, which involved not only bringing all of the various investment teams together under one visual identity, but also telling a cohesive story about the things that truly differentiate the company in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Marty Willis, Nuveen’s chief marketing officer, shared lessons she and her team have learned from the rebranding effort to a group of enthused financial marketers gathered by the Chicago Chapter of the Financial Communications Society at a luncheon on November 13.
Willis walked the audience through the steps she and the marketing team took to create a unified “brand house” from a group a numerous affiliate brands and then to roll out the brand internally and externally.
In doing so, Willis touched on several themes that we believe will be useful lessons for marketers in the asset management industry and across financial services more broadly, regardless of whether they are undertaking a full-scale rebrand anytime soon.
Brand is more important than ever in asset management
When you think of the industries where a company’s brand is paramount, institutional asset management may not be at the top of the list.
Unlike consumer products or technology—industries where the “softer” elements of how the end user feels about a company are viewed as key differentiators in a fickle landscape—institutional asset managers know that they ultimately are judged on “hard,” quantifiable factors, namely performance.
Furthermore, buying decisions in institutional asset management involve multiple rounds of rigorous vetting that are made by highly sophisticated teams (usually led by highly paid consultants)—not by consumers who are easily swayed by an emotional chord struck by a 30-second TV spot.
Still, as Willis said in her talk, there are elements to branding from the mainstream consumer world that serve a vital role for asset managers as well, particularly when it comes to staying top-of-mind when the buying cycle is longer than in other industries.
“With a strong brand, you are always on the shortlist of people who are considering you,” Willis said. “You’re seen as a safe choice if you have a strong brand.”
The most obvious name isn’t always the best
The title of Willis’ presentation, “House of Brands,” was a play on the fact that, when she joined the company 2 ½ years ago, the newly combined Nuveen-TIAA comprised more than a dozen brands and sub-brands that had been acquired by Nuveen or TIAA in their previous lives before the merger. Unsurprisingly, this created confusion both inside and outside the firm.
As a result, one of Willis’ top priorities in creating a transformational rebrand of the newly merged company involved consolidating all of the brands under one, unified name.
To settle on a new name for the combined company, Willis said that the marketing team faced three options:
- Come up with a new name entirely, a risky and costly option
- Stick with TIAA, the acquiring company, which seemed like the most intuitive and easiest route
- Use Nuveen, which had considerable brand cache in the market and a strong reputation among investors
After surveying both groups of employees and clients of both TIAA and Nuveen, the firm settled on “Nuveen, a TIAA company.” Willis said it went with the unconventional choice of using the name of the acquired company because the newly combined company believed that the Nuveen brand had strong equity in the market thanks largely to its leadership in the municipal business. Market research also showed that TIAA clients felt that the name Nuveen “modernized” the TIAA brand.
Show people how you think
The next phase of the newly combined company’s rebranding efforts involved an entire overhaul of the website. “It was Amazon meets Google,” Willis said, referring to the new website’s prominently placed search functionality (Google) to help clients find specific pieces of information, as well as its recommended content prompts based on users’ browsing patterns that made the overall website experience feel more personal (Amazon).
A big part of the website redesign was also a more coherent thought-leadership program called “Nuveen Knows,” which Willis said was designed to position the company’s leaders beyond product sales and make the larger rebranding effort more holistic. “People want to know how we think vs. just about the products we sell,” Willis said.
Part of the newly created “Nuveen Knows” program included implementing tactics to ensure that all of the company’s thought-leadership content remained unified and in accordance with the new brand messaging. Part of this effort includes using an online content committee and integrated email communication system to determine unified thought-leadership content topics and ideas across the company.
Willis also said that Nuveen’s new approach to white papers, blogs, videos, and other content involves putting more time and effort into focusing on proper distribution of its thought-leadership content. She said that distribution is every bit as important as the content’s editorial direction.
“You have to have promotion of it as well,” Willis said. “You can’t just be on the website; you have to drive [your desired audience] there.”
Determine what the name stands for
With the new name—and website—of the combined company in hand, Willis and her team set out to determine what the new brand stood for. Creating a truly differentiated brand in an increasingly crowded asset management industry meant the new Nuveen had to have a unique value proposition in the market.
Again, Willis said the firm took to interviewing both employees and clients to uncover the new combined company’s differentiating factor: the fact that it often co-invests along with its clients.
“That was credible because we often co-invested,” Willis said. “We ate our own cooking. We had skin in the game. That’s what clients really wanted. So we started to adopt this ‘investing by example’ and ‘leading by example’ [mantra] for employees as the brand positioning that we would take.”
Willis added that the brand is built on three pillars of differentiation, areas that Nuveen views as its greatest strengths relative to other asset managers:
- Fixed income
- Alternatives (Willis said Nuveen is the No. 1 asset manager when it comes to managing farmland)
- Responsible/sustainable investing
Willis said the firm intentionally excluded equities from its core brand pillars. Despite being a core part of Nuveen’s business and delivering strong performance, Willis said there is little about Nuveen’s equities business that clearly stands out from the field.
The branding lesson here: Asset managers need to be very focused on what differentiates them when it comes to branding, even if it means excluding elements that are core to their business. There is a limited amount of mental space that you can occupy in an investor’s mind, so you want to focus on a few things that are truly exceptional about your firm. No one will believe you if you claim to be a specialist in every asset class.
Building an asset management brand requires new distribution channels
Willis said Nuveen’s newly created brand and value proposition has been rolled out over a host of traditional marketing mediums and channels, including print and digital advertising and television spots.
But Willis also said that, as part of the new brand’s rollout efforts, the company realized that it needed to engage in new channels and formats as well, particularly partnerships with established names in the world of business media.
To this end, Nuveen worked to develop partnerships with outlets to create unique, out-of-the box content experiences. This included sponsoring things like lists (Forbes), editorial series (Bloomberg), documentaries (The Atlantic), and curated video playlists (TED).
Each was in an effort, Willis said, to encourage new and innovative ways to work with media companies, to “be more than just an advertiser, but a strategic partner.”
Listen to the entire audio of Willis’ presentation here:
About the Author
Scott Wentworth is the founder and head financial writer at Wentworth Financial Communications. Scott and the team of writers and editors at WFC help professionals across the financial services industry build their brands by creating investment-grade white papers, bylined articles, newsletters, blogs, social media posts, and other forms of content marketing.