• by Sarah Mahoney , Yesterday

Nuveen, which oversees more than $1 trillion in assets, has a familiarity problem. The 20^th-largest global asset manager ranks No. 16 in brand awareness. While that means it punches well above its weight, it's still far from the Top 10 -- and company research showed that top-10 status is a must-have.

Regardless of the type of investment product or what’s happening in the markets, those Top 10 brands are the ones that get a disproportionate amount of new assets in an up year, explains Tara Giuliano, Nuveen's CMO. And they also retain more assets during market downturns.

Giuliano tells Marketing Daily how those awareness goals shaped the new campaign.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marketing Daily: You’ve just rolled out “The Future Has Questions,” a new campaign from 72AndSunny, Toronto, that stars a bunch of 8-year-olds asking Nuveen execs investing questions. It’s cute, which isn’t a word usually used for high-finance ads aimed at investment managers. Why this approach?

Tara Giuliano: We have this long heritage and history, but many of our clients do not know, really, who Nuveen is. We have two primary audiences: financial advisors primarily in the U.S. and institutional investors, like pension funds, endowments and foundations. We don't sell directly to end investors.

About two years ago, we did a great deal of research about what made Nuveen distinct, and found it was this idea of generational investing and long-termism. That led to the launch last year of a platform called “Invest Like the Future’s Watching.”

We felt it was really different and bold. In our space, there’s a sea of sameness: everything is blue, with people shaking hands, performance charts and technical risk language. Ours was more human, and it’s already moved us up one ranking in awareness. We wanted to build on that brand momentum.

Marketing Daily: And how did that get you to the 8-year-olds?

Giuliano: The idea was, "How much more human can we get?" And how much more humbling could it be to have our most senior executives sitting on cushions with kids asking hard questions about the future and about long-term thinking? It fits in with our brand-building journey.

Marketing Daily: It is a struggle for many CMOs to get funding for brand efforts. Has it been hard at Nuveen?

Giuliano: We had to sell this through math, not just as a good idea. We were able to show that brand matters by looking at brand rankings in different countries and segments. It was clear, among the Top 10, that brand strength was giving them that disproportionate amount of assets.

We researched what our competitors were spending on brand, with what media strategies and specific messaging. We reverse-engineered what we need to do over the next five years, pitching this as a long-term investment.

And it fits us. Nuveen is about long-term investing. Our execs have all bought in. That’s literally in this iteration of the creative -- they appear in the ads. They understand this is a lever to grow the company, and they're all in on brand spending, including some surprising collaborations, like with Municipal, Mark Wahlberg's apparel brand, the Natural History Museum, and Formula 1.

Marketing Daily: How do you balance that with performance marketing?

Giuliano: Performance marketing just is not enough anymore. In investment management in the last decade, marketing teams have been obsessed with data-driven targeted marketing and largely ignored brand investment and brand building.

We have intentionally invested in brand alongside performance marketing, and we're continuing to invest in brand in new, surprising ways.

Marketing Daily: What's the media plan?

Giuliano: We're targeting the professional investor, so places like CNBC and Bloomberg TV, as well as social media, all in ways that overindex to financial advisors or to professional investors. There's consumer spillover, because consumers watch those channels too.

Because many of our competitors are marketing to the end investor, they have massive budgets. We've never had that. We can't outspend them, so we have to outthink them.

Marketing Daily: How long will it take you to get into top-10 aided awareness?

Giuliano: I think we will make it before five years, as a result of amplifiers that we are layering on, our growth strategy, and M&A activity.