MBA student Jonathan Poyer contacted me in late June for help with a research project on investment advisory marketing companies. I vaguely remembered Jonathan contacting me five years earlier when he had an internship at Orion Advisor Services, but don't know him. Advisor Products tries to be transparent and behave nicely, however, so I directed him to our website and offered to connect him with our marketing and sales department. A month later, after completing his research, Jonathan contacted me again to thank me. In an email, he told me how difficult it was to get straightforward answers from marketing companies specializing in serving investment advisors but that Advisor Products was different. Because he was indpendent and unbiased, I asked Jonathan to summarize what he learned in doing his research. Here’s what he says.
This summer, as an MBA intern at Brigham Young University, I chose to work for Gemini Fund Services; a company I worked for previous to business school. I worked on a great project putting together a business plan for a new entity that Gemini has been looking into.
A major portion of my project this summer was to obtain market research on third party marketing firms in the investment advisory space; especially those that provide marketing services for mutual funds. I spent over a month working on this project; speaking with over 30 firms as I wanted a comprehensive understanding of the industry. Since I had been in the business a number of years, I obtained information through contacts at the major custodians. In addition, I found a number of firms through Google searches, marketing events, and others through references on marketing collateral or websites. All told, I was able to interview almost 30 different people that focus on assisting investment professionals with their marketing initiatives. The two major questions that I sought to answer included: what key services do you provide and what is the general pricing for those services.