Something strange happens when it comes to design in asset management; we spend ages talking about independent thinking, challenging consensus and looking for opportunities others have missed, and then dedicate a good chunk of time to looking at what other asset managers are doing.
What happened to zigging when others are zagging?
There are plenty of reasons to be cautious in financial services, nobody wants to be the person who has to explain to the board why their new campaign has a giant inflatable person on the M25. But, somewhere along the way, caution has become a creative strategy and the result is an industry where a lot of brands are very well designed, but relatively few are particularly interesting.
This is why it can be more useful to take off the financial services blinkers. Not because asset management needs to start behaving like fashion, beauty or tech, but because other industries are often solving the same creative problems – just with considerably less baggage.
Switch it up
K18’s work with Uncommon is a good example. Its giant hairball campaign is ridiculous at first glance… you see an enormous hairball rolling through the streets and understandably wonder what’s going on. The idea creates curiosity before it explains itself, in turn the curiosity becomes the call to action, which is something financial brands are generally very keen to avoid. We tend to explain the thing first and hope someone finds it interesting afterwards.
Then there’s Polaroid, which has taken a pretty clear position on AI and digital overload. Its ‘Camera for an Analog Life’ campaign doesn’t try to compete with the technology, it argues for the thing technology can’t quite replicate: being present, making something physical and having a life that isn’t entirely happening on a screen. They have an opinion, which makes the design much easier to grasp, they’re not trying to make something distinctive from nothing, they’re expressing a point of view that already exists.
Etsy’s ‘Shop Other Jeffs’ does something similarly simple and clever. Faced with a shopping culture dominated by one particularly famous Jeff, Etsy found more than 5,000 other Jeffs on its platform and turned them into the idea. It was funny, timed around Prime Day, and rooted in what makes Etsy different. More importantly, it doesn’t feel like a campaign that could have been made by any marketplace.
The message is getting out there
I certainly don’t mean to imply that every asset managers is languishing in a creativity cul-de-sac.
Fearless Girl (image below) has taken a distinctive and unexpected route, with its creator State Street turning a piece of public art into something with a life of its own, building an identity and platform around a symbol. The interesting bit wasn’t really that there’s a new logo, it was recognizing that a brand asset could become bigger than the product it originally helped promote.
That takes a certain amount of nerve, particularly when your business is managing other people’s money.
Standard Life is a particularly interesting example. Its recent revitalization didn’t try to pretend it was a start-up, it kept the compounded trust of a 200-year-old brand but deliberately made the expression more optimistic, empathetic and relevant to modern life. It’s a useful reminder that distinctive doesn’t necessarily mean disruptive, sometimes it means being brave enough to behave like yourself.
This brings me to T. Rowe Price’s ‘Signals From the Noise’. It’s an impressive piece of work: thousands of particles, real market data, an immersive installation at the Oculus, all visualizing how active managers identify meaningful signals from market complexity. It’s a beautifully executed metaphor for exactly what the business does. The average person doesn’t need to know what an ETF is to understand messy particles transitioning into a clear pattern.
The opportunity for asset management design isn’t necessarily to be louder, stranger or more entertaining. It’s to be more curious about the world outside asset management and less concerned with whether the work looks like something an asset manager ought to make. Because, if we all keep looking at each other for inspiration, eventually the most distinctive thing any of us can do is look somewhere else.
