Some people actually do like vanilla.

John Hancock Investments is aggressively fighting to grow share in core equity products like large and mid-cap core and growth funds, and they are winning flows and marketshare, according to president and CEO Andrew Arnott.

To get more of a sense of Hancock's victories in 2013, check out this MFWire story from Arnott.

Here are some of Arnott's thoughts on the subject as he told them to MFWire staffers recently:

We have been quite focused on what I guess other folks have found boring, large cap core, large cap growth. People are saying, 'We are losing market share. ETFs are taking over a lot of this.' What we found, if you can bring the market a strong alpha manager, you have the opportunity to take marketshare.

We have actually been quite successful with our old fashioned cap value fund. That was our best selling fund last year.

It is a barbell strategy, it has really helped build the business.

There are not a lot of great growth managers. Very few have shown that over the long term, they can beat the market.

In fact, according to Arnott, Hancock's top two selling funds in 2013 were large and mid cap funds.

The Hancock chief says the company plans to pursue this area even more aggressively this year, given the fact that many competitors are devoting most of their creative and distributive attention to the alts space. (Hancock is also active in alts as well, having launched a fund in this space recently, with plans to launch more in the coming year.)

"Our sales team is seeing much more activity in this space. Since we're a manager of managers, we usually have a solution that is very good, and quite often better, to what clients had been previously using," he said. "Our message is that, while it may be hard to consistently do well in equities, it's not impossible." 

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