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Brands in the world of financial investing are a pretty conservative bunch, fond of their logos intelligently crafted from the safe and trustworthy blue and green Pantone hues and communication targeted with laser-like focus on the Baby Boomer crowd. When we see their print and television advertising, it's mostly comprises images of smiling silver hairs walking hand-in-hand happily in the mountains.

However, all of the brands in the market understand that the next big opportunity lies with Gen X, but they are taking time to craft their strategies, making sure they get them right and the image doesn't conflict with that of the parent brand.

These are ideal conditions for the emergence of an upstart, in the form of the perfectly named Thrasher, not a skate magazine, a grunge band, but a mutual fund.

A fund focused single-mindedly on the cool Xers, yep the same ones, who were singing along to Beck's Loser and were never supposed to confirm to the ideals of the Baby-Boomers.

Thrasher appears to know these people, what they look like, what they want to hear, but more than that, they know what they want in cool brands. Thrasher's fund let's Xers invest in the brands they love and spend most of your money on; H&M, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Microsoft?, Bank of America, American Apparel, Chevron?,etc. It remains to be see if Thrasher's bold entry forces the hand of the establishment players to throw their hats into the ring and launch their own Xtreme funds.

Via American Madness



Posted by Ed Cotton The latest news from Fidelity investments announcing the departure of a key marketing executive who developed its recent brand campaign, is yet another example of the ongoing marketing battle between product and brand marketers.

Focusing on brand building made sense as Fidelity had a great opportunity to carve out its own mind space with the Baby Boomer audience.

Perhaps the company feels that the brand job has been done and they can now switch to products. Clearly the market is changing and there's going to be more pressure on selling.

However, the only solution is to do both, build brand and sell product at the same time because success internally and in the marketplace depends on finding the right combination of brand and product message, focus too strongly on one and you can end up in trouble.

Ironically, Fidelity was supposed to be presenting its brand case study at the ANA conference.





Posted by Ed Cotton