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with Gemcorp's Tom Hughes · Two in Twenty

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 in 20.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Twink Field and I am the host of this podcast.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'm just like to say I'm talking to Tom Hughes from GemCorp, a business that you may not know, but it's a specialist emerging markets asset manager in the pack markets.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really interesting conversation with Tom around kind of just a specialist asset manager versus a more broader solutions player.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think really interestingly, kind of we touched on what it is to be a generalist and being intentional with your career, as well as really building a strategy that is situational in nature, very specific to each of your roles or or your kind of business's maturity.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think finally we did touch on the power of storytelling.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think specifically in GemCorp, they have that in space.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So look to our conversation to hear more.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Tom, it is great to see you and have you here on the podcast.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for taking the time.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: As it's become customary, it would be great if you could give us a little bit of a feel of your background, your career to date, and then we'll get into some questions.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I'm currently the Chief Marketing Communications Officer for Gem Corp.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to this, I've spent getting close to 20 years in asset management marketing, which makes me feel rather old, but uh at various different firms.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I was at Allianz Global Investors for about 12 years, did a range of marketing roles, and then um transitioned over to Hamburg and then were acquired by Perpetual and spent a few years there.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: And now find myself at GemCorp.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think probably worked at a kind of range of different firms, boutiques, larger managers, across a range of different asset class products.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I probably would probably position myself as a bit of an arch generalist, really.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's kind of who I am and uh what I do right now.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And really interesting, I think, that you've worked for different sizes of companies and obviously really sort of seen that as a big global solution provider versus kind of more specialist, more boutique in nature.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder whether you could kind of give us a bit of a view, I guess, as to how you see the market evolving, particularly with perhaps kind of more polarization that we're seeing between the kind of more specialist plays versus those really looking to be broad waterfronts of solutions.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's probably a bit too much of a uh, I guess my maybe contrarian view is a bit too much of a focus on saying, oh, well, you either have to be big or really specialist.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: I still think there's plenty of room for quite a lot of diversity in the uh kind of environment for asset managers.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think sometimes it's often about the kind of structure and maybe the ambition of the firm in terms of what it wants to achieve, maybe.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's plenty of room for being a you know 100, 200, 300 billion asset manager or even a bit smaller, and not being an arch specialist and still being, you know, still having a number of strategies that are a focus, a brand that's salient and having an appeal.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think they're, you know, there it's fair to say that the bigs are getting much bigger, and I think that's making it a bit trickier for everybody else, you know, and I think there's consolidation both on the asset manager side, but equally on the client side.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So there just isn't the same diversity in terms of the number of clients that you can go to and tap on the shoulder, and that just means that buy lists get smaller, shelf get shelf space gets smaller.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it makes the challenge of distribution ever more pertinent and maybe bringing it back to marketing.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think it makes marketing more important than it's ever been.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, brand and cut through matter more than they ever have.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're operating in a in a often in a B2B to C environment where your brand matters in terms of the underlying distributor that's bringing your product to market, and also your brand matters in terms of being salient for the client that you're selling to in just a B2B sense.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, yeah, it makes uh it makes the marketing challenge more interesting and and more important for a business.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, really interesting.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: I guess to your to your earlier point, I think there's there's definitely space in that sort of bookend uh picture that I painted to kind of be even specialists at scale, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't think I don't suppose you have to be in one camp or the other.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And to your point, you know, I was just sort of interested about Gen Corp's journey around brand and marketing.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I as I think I understand they didn't, it wasn't necessarily a function that they've had from the get-go, it's something that it kind of evolved along with the business strategy.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it'd be really interesting to kind of maybe share a little bit around their journey and the decisions by the founders to invest in marketing and how you see that relationship with the with the founders and your and your your thoughts around stakeholder management.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there's quite a lot, uh quite a lot in that.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think Gemcorp, we'll talk about my general view of firms like Gemcorp, and then maybe we'll talk about Gemcorp specifically a bit more.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think basically there are a lot of smaller firms that have traditionally underinvested in marketing.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that there's a realization, probably, and this is in both private and public markets.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Gem Corp's a private markets player, but it's the same in public markets, that you know, those smaller firms that have underinvested in marketing realizing that actually they they need to make an investment now.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of firms actually struggle to work out how to do that.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, my perspective of talking to similar sized peers and different people in the space is that often it's very, very hard when you're in that sub-5 billion, sub-10 billion category to work out how to do marketing because often they want a team or they want somebody, and there's like this sort of semblance of sort of a brand, and someone did some brand guidelines once, and there's a few slide decks, and there's a website, but there's no structure in managing them.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way of connecting them together, and then they can't work out what the shape of a team should be.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's like a really interesting space, actually, is that kind of smaller boutique space where I think there's a lot of opportunity to do way more with brand and marketing and recognition that they need to, but often a complete, a complete kind of lack of understanding about how to actually do it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's probably where Gem Corp was a little bit when, you know, when they kind of had the realization they needed to hire somebody.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: We also had some reputational stuff that we had to kind of fix.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was part of my role was coming in to kind of work on the reputation of the firm, but then also kind of building all of the structures and requirements that exist around a marketing function.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that is all of the digital technology and the rails on which marketing runs on from an operational perspective, so CRMs, automation tools, health enablement uh processes, building out slide decks, slide libraries, uh making sure that they're correct, the data's correct, connecting that with what what we do in investor relations on RFPs and RFIs, all the way up to the brand, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And content.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so that whole piece.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: When I started, I was the only person, so it was just just little old little old me and the team starting off.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I've got a couple more people helping me these days, thankfully.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it was uh it was a bit of a journey.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think lots of people get scared a bit by that taking on a role like that as well.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: So and I think it's interesting that the firm maybe chose to hire me and recognize the need for that requirement, because I think a lot of smaller firms can be a bit scared about maybe hiring a senior person as a one one individual in the team, and so they tend to go more junior, then that junior person then struggles to execute.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: So there's quite a lot in that.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe I'll stop there because I've kind of given a long answer to that question.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually, it's I want to sort of dig into that because I think you rather humbly said, you know, I just consider myself a generalist, and sort of which I think rather downplays it because when what you've just talked about really reinforces the sort of multidisciplinary nature of where marketing has evolved to and sort of what is now within the remit of heads of marketing.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the requirement to kind of wear all those different hats, particularly within a boutique or a smaller business that's just sort of building out the function.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess like just to give a bit of a flavor for that, like not everybody's gonna have that kind of range of skill set.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So is that just something that as you have gone through your career, you kind of you've got a natural curiosity or or or it's sort of lent into kind of how these things all thread together in order to kind of have the full picture?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how does somebody listening arm themselves with all of those the different understanding that's that's kind of now required, you know, as a as a leader in marketing?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it some of that is situational to when I started my career, and then some of it is probably deliberate.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the situational stuff is when I started my career, there was much less specialism in in asset management marketing.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I started my career, as I said, sort of just just just under 20 years ago or so, slightly less than that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I started my career, you know, there was most people were generalists, and you maybe had somebody doing digital, but you certainly didn't have reams of teams doing content and everything else.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of had somebody maybe who did RFPs if that was included in the team, and then you had a few generalists and maybe comms.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, that was often kept in marketing.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: So that that meant that when I started, there was you I was inevitably a generalist when I started, and then probably over that course of my time working, the specialisms have kind of appeared, and that's probably the kind of the situational element, and then the deliberate element was that I really went out of my way to go and get experience in a range of different disciplines in the marketing department.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of always had in my head that I wanted to be head of marketing CMO, and so my view on that was that I would not do that by being a kind of deep specialist in any one area, right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew that I had to go and get experience in marketing operations, in digital, in content, in product marketing.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I made sure that I was either exposed to that in through the generalist roles where I was, you know, spent a lot of time doing it, or I literally had a role dedicated to it.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so digital specifically was one area where I knew that I would need to spend more time.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I was lucky enough to have the opportunity when I went for Alliance Global Investors to lead the digital team globally, for example.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would say that yeah, it's so some of it kind of situational accidental, and some of it kind of made an effort so that I felt that I had a broad church of skills that I'm able to use today.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that talks to the intentionality of how one builds one's career these days and the sort of requirement to really think about how all these different elements thread together for the kind of most impactful marketing strategy.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe uh, Tom, you talked a little bit around sort of reputational work, brand work that you were looking at brought in to address.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much of that you you can share, but equally also what tactics you sort of deployed in order to help change that picture.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think I won't go too much into all of the detail of it, but I think there was a few principles that I knew that we kind of had to had to adopt.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: It became very kind of clear to me quickly that at Gem Corp it's full of great stories.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look, we're an EM private credit manager, right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we invest in some amazing stuff, be that you know, infrastructure projects in Africa, dams or water treatment facilities or ore refineries.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So like huge, amazing projects that visually are incredibly arresting and definitely have cut-through, right?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, most other asset managers just don't have that kind of project that they can share, that kind of story that they can share.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, being able to do, and you know, you took the Mickey out of me when we did our podcast, I think, in uh at the Kabinda aura refinery where I'm wearing a silly hat having some fun.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: But like that's super visually arresting, right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like, not many asset managers get to do a podcast live from an aura refinery in Angola.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I immediately saw the stories.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew that that was going to be absolutely core to what we would what we would do, is kind of doing those stories.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then I also thought, well, look, we need to make this very human-centric.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we have we're lucky that we're owned by our founders.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: The founding stories are amazing.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all of our founders come from the emerging world.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a huge degree of authenticity that we can bring to our story.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I kind of thought, look, it's about telling the great stories about what we invest in and then telling it through the lens of our of our founders as well, is really important.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then the broader teams that support them.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it was all about like how can we build more of a human connection?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was lots trying to do lots more video, some audio.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we launched the podcast, you know.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, making some quite deliberate choices about how that content would shape our reputation and how it would how it would help how we come across.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that that was they were kind of some things I I I think I thought in terms of just embedding that, you know, story first, very narrative-based, very human, as a way of kind of uh changing how people might perceive us and how that would affect our our our reputation.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then also I think just getting in place a lot of the foundational blocks that uh that support good reputation in terms of how people look at you.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So making sure that your search, how you appear in AI is as good as it can possibly be.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So making sure that you have all the right componentry, the right materials, content in the right places where those where those tools go, how you look on Google, you know, making sure that your website is presentable, it makes sense, it's easy to use, easy to understand.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, some of this stuff sounds kind of basic, but like the number of firms that still are getting that stuff, I think, wrong.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um is is kind of surprising.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, so it was it was kind of the foundational elements, and then I think that focus on storytelling and and putting people at the center of what we do.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Very cool to kind of humanize the brand in that way.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess it's super interesting, isn't it?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's sort of the balance of storytelling and content and how we know that a lot of people are using AI within their content these days, and so I guess sort of where that marriage comes through, because I think storytelling, as you say, is absolutely the way in which we can cut through and really sort of talk to our edge and build our brand, but not always do people have the great stories that that you're sharing, and so you know, the tendency is just like we just got to push out content versus find the story.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, kind of like what your views are on that, because I think you know, there's an efficiency play to one part, which a lot of people are looking to bring through, versus like how do we shine up and tell our story in the best way and really invest in that and tell and do less, but make it really impactful, and like this of impact versus efficiency is such a sort of dynamic, you know, that people are having to hold both thoughts in their head.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder what your thoughts are.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think the challenge is really hard.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I can just say, look, I'm gonna do less, make it more, right?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't have to be everywhere all the time saying everything about a thousand different products, right?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've got relatively narrow product range, you know, quite a specific focus, and so I'm I can be relatively targeted in what I'm doing.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I have worked for a big asset manager, so I've also seen the other side of it where it's like we need to comment on this, we need to comment on that.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: What are we sending out every week?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so so I would say to a degree it's situational by what you're trying to achieve.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think my general view on like on content that you produce is if you're gonna produce it, make it worthwhile, right?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're asking a client to give up their time and click on something and spend some time reading it.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a quite a big I always think that's like a big sacrifice if you think about what goes on in the market.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I think about just myself, like I don't really click on that much stuff, really, during my day on the emails I receive, the marketing I get bombarded by.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so if somebody you want, if you expect someone to do that and then you send them to something that looks, feels low value, like you didn't really think about it, then I don't think that person's gonna click on anything that you produce ever again.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: So my view on that one is like even if you're in a world where you have to produce a lot of content, I wouldn't be obsessed whether it's AI or not.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is it good?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: That it just measures that.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is it good?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Is should somebody give up this time for this?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Am I saying something original and interesting?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think it's like, you know, this arbitrary thing, did AI produce it or not?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: It should just be like, is this high quality?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Does this fit the level the brand wants to be at?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, if you're BlackRock doing it, you know what?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like it has to be really high grade because it's black rock, right?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I think, yeah, I wouldn't get fixated on like how do we come up with this, whatever?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is the thought interesting?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Should somebody give up their time?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Does this fit where the brand wants to be?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And if it does those things, then you know what?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Produce it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then you now the question then is okay, how do you do that quality at the cadence that you might want?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, then you're gonna need to use some tools and technology to achieve that.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: But you can be smart with it.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, you need the right people and the right balance.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, just my judgment would be can I produce enough really good content in the areas that I want on the topics that I want.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: That should be the question you should ask yourself.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nice, great, love that answer.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess maybe just to start to kind of round us out and consciousness of time is is ticking by.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: But also I think there's, and you'll have heard me say and ask this on other kind of podcast conversations, but this thing of thought around your budgets and and again intentionality and where every dollar goes, and and how we think about long-term brand building versus the sort of the short-term impact or or kind of results that kind of we need to show back to the business.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of takes us back to the sort of stakeholder management bit that I was asking about earlier.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you present both as critically important to your stakeholders to kind of have that arc and umbrella of kind of brand building as well as the kind of the near-term cadence and momentum of of early results?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you may you have to make sure that there's an alignment between you and the senior people in the business, be it the founder, be it the COI, the CFO, about what you're trying to achieve.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to think about your plan.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: In my opinion, there's no if a marketing plan is less than three years, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're probably gonna set yourself up to fail.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to have a three-year arc of time when somebody will give you that to achieve what you want to achieve.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you should say, in three years, I want to be X, Y, and Z.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Here are the goals over that period of time.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that that's that's generally how I think about if you want me to have any impact on your brand, it's gonna take three years, I'm afraid.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: That that's the reality of business.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: The best time to start building a brand was always yesterday.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you don't want to do it, and we can kind of keep doing the short-term stuff and whatever, but it won't, it's not gonna move the needle long term.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone has to be aligned on that vision, right?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's important.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then then the buy-in of then how do you balance your things?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Look, I'm not saying that you can just wait three years and deliver nothing.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: You have to show progress towards your goal, of course, right?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that is incremental, right?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like your bland fat lines and then goes crazy after three years.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: It takes time, but and you can show that.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's loads of ways you can show that, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like you should be seeing more interaction on your social media, more people attending your online events, your physical events, more people interacting with your content, reading things, opening your emails.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like as your brand grows, right?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: Big brands get attention, small brands get less.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So as you invest in it, in theory, that should grow.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you should be able to show the positive movement towards that.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then my view then is if you have that view, you're not so fixated on the short and the long of it, right?
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know where you want to get in three years, and then there are a set of tactics and tools that you can use to achieve that, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you just have your vision of where you might want to be in six months, in 12 months, okay?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then you execute those tactics against it, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's just part of your mix.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you're gonna need to use events, you're gonna need to use advertising, you're gonna need to use sponsorship, you're gonna need to use those things.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you just need to work out where your brand is, what your ambition is as to how you're gonna use those tools to do it.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the ambition of growing a uh, you know, a 300 billion asset management brand, right, over three years is very different to growing one that's a one billion asset management brand or a two trillion asset management brand.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they've got a completely different set of tactics that will need to be executed to achieve your three-year vision.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd say I don't think there's one fits all approach to saying use these short-term things, these long-term things, whatever.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have a situational approach which fits your brand, your stakeholders, take a long-term view and use a full range of tactics to achieve it.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like we're kind of already answering the question for sort of tips for listeners and uh, you know, kind of thinking about that.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: So anything else you would add to that as we as we sort of draw draw ourselves to a close?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what tips would I have?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think, look, I think yeah, you you you need to build something that I think definitely, as I say, too many people do something that is kind of a cookie-cutter thing.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that most of what we can do in our businesses is cookie cutter.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it needs to be bespoken, tailored, and realistic.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think you need to take a long-term view to achieving anything in marketing, right?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so anybody who's demanding things short-term, you know, that that makes your job very, very hard as a marketer.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: People demand short-term results.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is a performance element to what we do, but I think, you know, what like somebody saying marketing needs to get me X number of people to a webinar in X period of time feels like someone who doesn't really understand what you're trying to achieve.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe you've got to you've got to get out of there when somebody does that to you.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, some they they would be, they would be kind of uh they would be my kind of my big views.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I think you know, look, just always take a whole of market view in terms of the tactics of what you can use.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you know what?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's that I always like to say, you know, it's obviously a famous expression, but you know, to uh to a to a hammer, everything's a nail.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you know what, sometimes to content people the answer's always content, to digital people, it's always digital, whatever.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think sometimes that being able to be able to take a view across a broad spectrum of things and saying, right, actually, the right tool here is sponsorship or the right tool here might be performance marketing, you know, using that that mindset is um is important.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe just to sort of hammer this home in terms of our podcast, um, Tom, what is your view in terms of what does success look like for marketing and financial services?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think success is having a commercial impact.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Simple as that, right?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're not here to do anything except uh help the firm make money.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're not helping the firm make money, then you're not doing a job.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, it's a really simple one.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Did I affect the bottom line?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: And my view on that one is like, oh, people then say, well, what are the metrics and did you calculate the ROI or whatever?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, to be honest with you, my the firms I've worked in in my career, I've either known I've had an impact or I kind of know I haven't.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: And like there's not a number or some ROI calculation that makes me feel any better than that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: You either have a good feel for it and the business goes, you know what?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like in marketing, we're kicking it right now.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I see our stuff, people talk about our white paper, I see us in the media, the comms team are doing well, the sales team like what we're producing, the materials look great.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know you're having an impact.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need somebody to tell me that there's some weird hooky number that I spent ages trying to calculate that told me it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like you either know or you don't.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, there's been times in my career when I've done stuff and I thought, yeah, that didn't work.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, we're not kicking it right now.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: That there was an error here.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: That didn't work, that didn't have any impact.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: I spent too much money on this.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so you know.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so for me, I think you just have to be ultra-commercial.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're here to make money and we're here to contribute to the firm making money.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the only uh that's the only outcome that matters for me, is the firm being successful in growing and growing its profitability in its AUM.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Tom, that's awesome.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for letting me sort of pepper you with my questions and sort of go anywhere, sort of remit.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: So uh thank you.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's been great chatting to you today.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Happy to join you.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Twink.