ABOUT

A Smart Evolution was First State Investments’ first marketing campaign to promote its Diversified Growth Fund to UK Financial Advisers. This was the first multi-asset product from First State, launching in a saturated market.

As First State Investments were not known for multi-asset, The Dubs had the difficult task of gaining attention from established mega-competitors, requiring a memorable point of difference.

With a budget well below many competitors, First State Investments took an innovative and agile approach to media, and a calculated risk to ‘look different’ in order to earn attention and leads using interactive, digital tools. The results surpassed targets by more than 82%, the social prospect conversion rate peaked at 7.9% and research on third-party platforms increased by 495% during the campaign.

Concept
With the knowledge that we needed to earn attention, resonate and stand out, we returned to research to look at what really made advisers tick when considering multi-asset.

Focus groups uncovered one strong stand-out theme that was essential for the audience: transparency.

We took this insight literally, and from the outset aimed to share as much information about the Fund as possible, and openly commit to advisers that we would continue to do so.

A more flexible, dynamic, modern Diversified Growth Fund A Smart Evolution.

Execution
We positioned First State Investments' product as DGF 2.0, a superior, more evolved version of traditional DGF funds. We achieved this by inviting audiences to “Imagine if humans hadn’t continued to evolve intelligently?”.

We supplemented key Fund features with a series of images of iconic, attention-grabbing,
household items that were at the time of release considered revolutionary. Other advertisers typically used sleek and modern visuals to promote multi-asset.

We took audience demand for transparency literally, and created interactive digital tools hosted on a campaign microsite. The DGF Navigator shared every asset allocation throughout the Fund’s history via an interactive data visualisation, while the DGF Wiki invited users to submit questions to the investment team and review questions of their peers.

Results
365 new leads, enriched by online data to allow more relevant conversations (better for contacts & the business).

Proven and tracked increased demand for product information on platforms (Financial Express Data) and our website (factsheet downloads).