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Gaining Permission

by Derek

Last quarter in our Distribution Industry Analysis, and in our recently released whitepaper called Redefining Marketing: Turning Strangers into Salespeople, kasina introduced the concept of the Advisor Continuum. The concept outlines the opportunity that asset management firms have to progress relationships along a continuum in order to have increasingly productive and beneficial contact with advisors.

Today, asset management firms are most comfortable with and do a satisfactory job of turning Friends into Customers. Firms do a poor job of turning Strangers into Friends. One critical element of turning Strangers into Friends is establishing permission to enter into a dialogue with the audience.

To gain permission, firms should devise a strategy that incorporates incentives, independent input, and the leveraging of existing customers. Examples of permission initiatives exhibited by asset management firms help provide an understanding of how firms are putting this concept into practice today.

• Fidelity's Baby Boomer campaign featuring Paul McCartney offered an exclusive message to a targeted audience and incorporated a CD give-away as an incentive to get Boomers to agree to a retirement planning consultation with a Fidelity rep.



• Nuveen Investments offers exclusive independent content to advisors through its Web site. The firm summarizes what advisors can get on a publicly available page as an incentive for advisors to register and log in.
• Morningstar ratings are commonly used in firm advertising to showcase independent value.
• Evergreen Investments and Lord Abbett offer value-added programs to a mix of Strangers and Friends/Customers/Salespeople. They not only offer the incentive of useful content, and at times independent input, but also the opportunity for the firms to leverage the interaction of existing customers.
• IXIS Asset Management offers an "e-Mail to a Friend" feature on its Web site that can facilitate the communication among Customers/Salespeople and Strangers.

Current initiatives tend to be weighted towards offering incentives in the form of free services or exclusive content. Asset management firms could do much more in the way of leveraging independent value as well as the opinions of existing customers.

In addition, in order to build permission and a dialogue, firms need to do more than just give things of value away, they must know who is consuming this information. Failing to do so may still lead to a positive advancement along the continuum, but firms will have a difficult time tracking the success of a particular marketing initiative. To be effective, permission initiatives should involve an exchange of information where the Stranger gets information from the company and the company receives information about the Stranger in order to enable the continuation of the dialogue.