For all the talk of branding, many asset management firms struggle to tell their story in a truly distinct and compelling way. While their messaging may check all the generic boxes around trust, transparency and pedigree, it can fail to deliver in describing the firm's true differentiator, its edge.

Institutional asset owners rely on low-cost index funds for their core blend allocations. Yet they remain intensely interested in established active and emerging niche managers to create alpha and enhance diversification. Winning these narrower mandates requires focus, agility and a compelling edge.

Mid-size asset managers mired in a no-growth rut would be well served by an authentic self-assessment of when and why organic growth stalled. Our friend and colleague, Janet Campagna (former CEO, QS Investors) notes that perhaps they can be motivated to do so by the realization that others, including their employees, clients, rivals and potential acquirers, already are taking a critical look at their business.

It's easy to get excited when performance improves, but as the proverb reminds us, fortune can be fleeting. Perhaps the true, lasting value of an upturn is the opportunity it presents to better understand the key drivers of performance and to explain them clearly to investors.

We argue competing against free has raised the bar on successful communications for active managers. The most basic questions, what makes you different and what makes you better, need to be answered in memorable and compelling ways.

It is the blessing and curse of our professional lifetimes that knowledge and technology have driven the price of diversification essentially to zero. In 2021, the ability to create a well-diversified portfolio, designed to sidestep unnecessary risk, is essentially free.

In the Frank Capra classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey is besieged by a series of setbacks and mishaps. Driven to the brink of bankruptcy and facing certain arrest, a drunken Bailey walks out onto the bridge prepared to accept that—with his $15,000 life insurance policy in hand—he is worth more dead than alive.