Marketing managers can spend hours on fact sheets, data and charts for you to use in client meetings. But should they?
Imagine you're in a client meeting. You're discussing various companies and covering all the performance statistics with charts and graphs for each. You really want your client to understand why you like a particular stock so you're breaking it down company and making a special point to cover lots and lots of statistics. Look closely-have their eyes glazed over yet?
Your meeting is over and you send them on their way armed with fact sheets and a head swirling with stats and data.
Now, imagine instead of bombarding them with numbers, you meet with your next client and tell them about a little company in Atlanta you think is poised to do really well. This company grows peaches like so many other companies in Georgia. But, the peach company president recently stumbled upon a fertilizer that is helping peach trees grow twice as fast, produce twice as many peaches that are each two times larger than an average peach. At the rate this company is growing peaches they're going to dominate the market in no time.
Which client will have a better recollection of the information shared during the meeting? Which client can easily understand why you're excited about a particular stock? The client who learned about the peach tree company.
It's all about the story.
It's about taking the mundane and making it more exciting, memorable and relatable. Marketing managers in the asset management industry can be better using their talents in telling the story of the product rather than the mundane details of it. In a recent blog post on DST Kasina, Mike Cogburn said asset managers have an opportunity to move beyond fact sheets by telling deeper stories to customers that are more likely to read them and listen to them. You can read more about it here.