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Transcript

with Ninety One's Malcolm Fried · Two in Twenty

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to another episode of 2 in 20.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Tweetfield, and I'm the host of this podcast brought to you by Alpha Agency.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Today I am delighted to say that I'm talking to Matthew Freed, who is the CMO of Mighty One.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: He talks to a very powerful culture that sits at the center of that business, but he looks all from his marketing team.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: But also, I think interestingly, this needs for all marketers to be a business person threat.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that commercial thread really plays through the whole of our conversation.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: So straight over to the conversation I had with Amelia.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Malcolm, hi, it's so great to talk to you today.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for giving me some of your time.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to get into some questions, but um before I do, maybe you could just run us through a little overview of your career and then we can get stuck in.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Twink, thank you.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um I guess like a lot of marketers, I've had a bit of a peripatetic, I think I said that right, peripatetic career, uh, bouncing back and forth.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've been a CMO for 10 years, uh this week, um, half that time at 91, and before that at Investec Bank, which used to be the group company with 91 before we hived off indeged.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, before that, I spent the bulk of my time at Bloomberg, mostly in London, where I ended up as the MD for the media business for EMIA.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Before that, I was in South Africa running a commercial radio group.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And before that, what was I?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was a lawyer for a little while.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think the best thing I did for the legal profession was leave it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um that that that was writing copy for JWT in Cape Town.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's me.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of all over the place and and culminates in what I do today.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So everything is help.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating and interesting um sort of gathering of deep expertise to then play into your role today, no doubt.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I think, you know, in in our racket, Twink, because there isn't a regulated entity which says you have to have the following qualifications in order to do this role, because there really isn't an industry body that oversees us or we come to it from different places and different areas, there probably are some qualities or attributes we have to have to do this job well.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, whenever I'm sitting on a panel or meeting people, it's always interesting to me to understand where we all come from.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Malcolm, maybe in terms of um the questions I've got, I was mindful that a lot of the time in this podcast, you know, it's all very positive, upbeat, you know, sort of there's nothing touching us in terms of industry or, you know, it's all upward trajectory.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I wondered whether we could start a different place today because I'm I'm mindful it's been a hard couple of years uh for asset managers, and um I know your flows are back looking healthy again, so it's a good time to talk maybe with a bit of a rearview mirrored to what do you think has been really helpful to the business to sustain it through a couple of hard years, as I say, you know, really build on the kind of or help the resilience of the team.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, good question.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so industry-wide, the investment management, the asset management industry has been through probably three years of extremely testing times, um, you know, characterized by this is not a secret to say there's uh a reduction in net flows, in many cases a reduction in revenue, in many cases clients pulling money.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, certainly as as interest rates peaked, um there was an adverse effect uh on on a very large number of investment managers.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: The cycle appears in some cases to be turning now, as you point out.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we are certainly feeling a lot better than we were a year ago and two, three years ago.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: What got us through this was your question, not my rambling about industry-wide.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I think what got us through this um was really a focus on the fundamentals, and that means in respect of the business, asking ourselves a couple, three years ago, what are we?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it meant focusing very hard on our positioning, not trying to be a lot of things or panicking in the face of adversity.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: It meant saying, What is our positioning?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's bear down on that and let's make sure, and I'm not going to talk in abstract terms here, what what do I mean by positioning?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make sure that we know what we do well or what we should do well.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Number one.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make sure that we know what our clients want and need, and let's make sure number three, that there's not a lot of overlap between those two things and what the competition or our peers are doing.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: That to us is positioning.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: What we do well, what we should do well, bubble number one, bubble number two, where there should be serious overlap, what do our clients want and need?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then bubble number three, what's the competition doing really well?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: There should be minimal overlap with that one.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we asked ourselves those questions, and with I think as much discipline as we could, we bore down on that positioning and making sure that that was right for us.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's number one.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's what helped us get through this relatively intact.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't do any big rounds, in fact, we did no redundancies.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we did nothing of that nature.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, what really has helped us has been the longevity of people who work at this organization.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're fortunate.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: We have a very uh on the average, I think people stay here longer than elsewhere.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um founder, for example, is still in place.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: He founded this business in 1991, hence the name.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he's very very active, he's chief executive, he's still very much in place.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think the average tenure in our exco has got to be at least 20 years, probably pushing 25, probably 25 years.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, people stick around a long time.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: That means there's a profound institutional knowledge, and it means that many people at this firm have operated through the cycles, and that is tremendously helpful.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the third thing is that um nobody catastrophizes, nobody panics.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, people take a measured, careful look at everything internally and externally, and consequently we get to outcomes uh or solutions that tend to work in our case.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Really interesting, actually.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Quite relevant.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've just been doing some work recently on a on an asset manager that really focuses on culture to choose its um investments and how that creates this really powerful moat for a business and competitive advantage that feels like that's really at play.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And 91, and that sort of cultural strength drives the longevity and all of that sort of measured cultural positioning, it's obviously powerfully at work.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so thank you.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Really interesting to hear.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess I wonder whether you could just, you know, we talked a bit about the um, you know, we talked before about the sort of target market for 91 and that sort of hyper focus um that's you know tallies with your positioning.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Could you share a bit more around what that means when it comes to the marketing tactics and strategy and things?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yes.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh we're predominantly um a firm that serves the institutional market, certainly outside of South Africa.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have globally only several hundred clients, target target asset owners, we call them TROs, target clients globally.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have defined that number very, very carefully.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um we serving clients from Los Angeles in the west all the way to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong in the east.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like and is a very large geographical area, but within that area we have several hundred target asset owners.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is it.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean for us as marketers?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's great for us, and it's also very difficult.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's great for us because our entire target market is defined by name of client, by region.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: We know exactly who we are targeting.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's difficult for us because our job is to penetrate as deeply as possible into each one of those target asset owners.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: We have to know them as well as we possibly can.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: What we don't have to do is run significant out-of-home, above-the-line campaigns involving volumes of advertising where we often have to hope for the best.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we are doing kind of amorphous name awareness and the like.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: We don't do any of that stuff.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: We don't.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you have somewhere between three and five hundred target asset owners globally, why would you do that?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why would you do that?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a waste of money.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't do that.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: What we do are far more targeted campaigns and initiatives to get or to build, if you like, a relationship of value between our firm and those TAOs.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: That could entail anything from producing a very sophisticated and interesting white paper that might be for just a dozen of those target asset owners, or it might be something more significant.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: But everything we do is targeted only at that group.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody I meet at a conference who happens to be an allocator, target asset, or an asset owner says to me, I've never heard of 91, I don't get fussed unless they're within the target group.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: If many of them have heard of us, I almost say to myself, that might be a problem because we're aiming at the wrong group.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't necessarily want or care for target for asset owners to hear of us if they're not within the target, if you're following me.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: It means I may be wasting money.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: It means I may not be targeting sufficiently well.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's fascinating you talking about those accounts because it reminds me of a phrase that I was told years ago around needing to turn the bow tie around so that with key accounts, you you don't just have this sort of singular connection point at the center, but really make sure you have that sort of longer side, that depth of side of multiple contacts all the way through your business with another business that you're looking to sort of engage with.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it feels like that sort of approach of really connecting at multiple levels.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and I guess just sort of thinking around that hyper-target approach.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I imagine that we're talking a lot about a sort of data-led or data-centric strategy as well.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I um I totally obviously embraced that requirement, but I always have this sort of uh tension in me around like how to make sure that data and and making decisions based um focused on data doesn't obscure or neutralize or remove the need for creative.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like so the and I just kind of wondered kind of what your thoughts are on that, you know, with such a hyper-targeted approach, do you still try and marry creativity?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not this sort of full above-the-line activity, but but in other ways.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, really good question.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: I two things.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: In respect of data, I would distinguish this.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: We do not do significant digital outreach, if you like.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: The way that we create relationships of value with our clients is by being human, by being people.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: People respond to people in our experience.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, an institutional invest, an institutional client, especially one we didn't know very well, at the foothills of relationship would not respond to an email, would not respond to anything digital at all.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Life is too short, time is too short.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Why would they?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't myself, why would anybody?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, Twink, when we're talking about digital, what we're talking about are tools that let us understand where these clients are, how they're operating in the firmament relative to others, how they're allocating.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm talking down, I'm talking about drawing down on publicly available information here.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: What we're not talking about are are using digital channels for us to approach these clients or to stay in regular contact with these clients.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: That that that is not for us something that is useful.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not something we should deploy at all.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um in respect of your second question, which is creativity, this is extremely important.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: The mere fact that we're not doing large advertising campaigns doesn't mean that we should not be creative.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a for example.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um we are just now creating a very, very deep and important piece of research, a research paper that we'll probably distribute or share or offer to 20 of these target clients.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: No more than that.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: This paper is taking us somewhere between four and and six or seven months to produce.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's an original piece of work, we've got some very serious people involved in producing it.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's going to incorporate data, it's going to span at least two different continents, and then we're going to put it into the kind of design that will give us a paper that will be very dense with charts, uh, data visualization, animated graphics.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's going to be a tremendously interesting piece of work.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of course it's going to be creative.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why it's got to be like that is because you know better than I.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you produce a piece of work that cuts through the most voluminous amount of clutter, nobody's going to look at it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we focus our creativity.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not on the billboard on the side of a bus shelter, but on that work that has to grab a very busy, very smart, very astute person by the lapels and say to her or him, you've got to at least look at this.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's our that's our creative challenge, okay?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not putting in front of that person a white page with a headline on it and hoping for the best, or an old-fashioned PDF that arrives by email and hoping they will go and have a look at it.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, they won't.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: They won't.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's got to be something absolutely exceptional and extraordinary that makes them look at it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting more solicitations, more marketing solicitations served us to up to us right now in one hour, if we're scrolling online, than than than than my father probably got in a lifetime.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's our challenge.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that care in the craft is all part of that cut-through, you know, like the real consideration and focus on those individuals you're trying to reach.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's unbelievably important.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what we say here is in respect of our brand, you're doing one of two things at all times.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: You're either building it up or you're breaking it down.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever we do, we're either building the brand or we're breaking it.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's never a period of stasis.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're not doing nothing.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're sending off or sharing or standing in front of a client with a presentation based on a white paper, the very first slide you put up is either going to build or break that brand.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a spelling mistake on page one, you're breaking the brand.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a dodgy color palette, you're breaking it.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a stupid visual, you're breaking it.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the binary thing that we're doing.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, by being creative, in the best possible sense, we're building it.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Smartly creative.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: By being otherwise, we're breaking it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Love that.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: I also think just that first slide, it gives me the heebie-jeebies, because so many put their first slide up and it's just all about them, and nothing on that first slide is ever about the the color client.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think that is like crazy.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's wild.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you think where's the benefit?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I even looking at this?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the benefit, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's the old school, lead with a benefit anyway.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Malcolm, give me your thoughts then around how this way of looking at the world and marketing, what this then means for them for marketers themselves, you know.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think what what I guess how do we need to change?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: What expectations do you have of your team, you know, to really deliver on this brand building um charge that you are on, you know, with data and hyper focus for clients and creativity at the core?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: I expect two things.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one is for them to understand our definition of what a brand is.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots, if you were to look in ChatGPT or Google, which is what I think old people do now.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: They look at Google, but if you look in ChatGPT or Google and you say define a brand, there are lots, there are lots of ways to do it, but we have one.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: A brand for us is the sum total of everything we do and say.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Less important what we say, more important what we do.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's what a brand is.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's our definition.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a function of performance, it's a function of how we say hello and shake hands, it's a function of how we conduct ourselves on Teams calls, absolutely everything.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because why?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because that then leads to the reputation and the promise and everything else.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, number one, the team has to understand that and has to decouple from what some marketers understand a brand to be, which is the outer concentric circle or the wrapping paper, or the color palette, or the logo.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is a very minor part of what the brand brand is.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Number one.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is, and the only two things they have to do, number two is they have to be commercial.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: They have to be commercial, they have to be business people before they are marketers.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: They have to be marketers who are business people, not just marketers, because if we just describe ourselves as marketers, the temptation is to operate in a parallel channel to the business.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get people who start saying things like, What's my budget?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's their first question, instead of what is my goal as a commercial person.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: I get really scared when I interview somebody for a job and they say, What's what's the budget I have to operate with?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first question.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the interview ends.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: I I much prefer it when someone says, What is the objective?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: What's the commercial objective?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because everything else follows.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: So to answer your question, two things.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Definition of a brand, if we accept that, we're good.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And second thing is be commercial, be a business person first, because when those two things happen, in our experience, we get good outcomes.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: When one of those two or both are missing, we get bad outcomes.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Really interesting.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess also to the kind of final question here, the really strong thread through your answers, Malcolm.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I wonder whether you could wrap us up with the kind of final question around any kind of final tips for listeners who are building their careers, who are hearing what you're saying.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any kind of final thoughts for them based on you know kind of the way that you see the world?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think there'd be two things that would be really important right now.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're two things.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not enough to be uh commercially astute, it's not enough to be empathetic, it's not enough to be curious, it's not enough to be well qualified or technically sound.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think there are two things that are necessary to flourish in the world, certainly of financial services marketing, or have a shot at flourishing.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: One is be financially literate, be able to read and understand financial statements, be able to understand what lets a business win.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Number one.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: Number two is, and this is too late for me because I'm too old, operate or be able to operate at an extremely high pace with extremely complicated tech.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't, you'll be left for dust.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um technology, while it has developed quickly since the 90s, certainly since the late 90s, consider the you know, uh internet, uh, email, etc., etc.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly it started ramping up since 2022 with the advent of open AI and ChatGPT.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Consider what has faced marketers.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Unless we can understand, appreciate, and most importantly, deploy that technology in the massive sturst that is confronting us right now at a very high pace, um, we're going to be left for dust.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's those two things be a financial person and master the tech.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't, you probably have no place in this business.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Malcolm, you've given, well, certainly you've given me a lot to think about, food for thought for all of us, I think.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and really kind of making us all really reflect on whether we're at our at our best for this industry.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you very much.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's been great talking to you.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Twink.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Always good to talk to you.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.