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Thursday, October 25, 2007 Vanguard and Fido are the Stars, So Where Does Your Fund Firm Rank in Growth Potential? Cogent Research has applied its predictive model to fund firms to tease out which funds will be tomorrow's Stars, Leaders, Players or Drifters, based on their growth potential. Only two firms managed two garner Star scores, Vanguard and Fidelity. Vanguard is the lone firm to have received Star scores in all four measurement areas. “Vanguard has serious momentum behind its mutual fund business, which is strong and getting stronger,” said Bruce Harrington, managing director of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Cogent, in a news release. “The only weak spot for the second-place firm, Fidelity, is customer loyalty relative to the firm’s strengths in other areas.” Meanwhile, Eaton Vance is the only firm to receive Drifter rankings in all categories. This, Cogent officials said, suggests the need for a strategic marketing campaign to build the fund firm's brand and increase loyalty. “Financial services firms have good intelligence about where they stand today, but it is where their business will be in the future that keeps asset managers up at night,” Harrington said. “If a company has strong brand equity and wallet share among clientele, yet has low customer loyalty, it may look strong today, but it is likely to lose market share in the year ahead.” Cogent's Investor Brandscape analysis uses customer loyalty, ownership, revenue and equity of brand to measure the strengths and weakness of each ranked company. Some drops of knowledge gleaned from the analysis include: - Fund firms with affiliated brokerage platforms received high scores owing to increased wallet share, greater penetration across investment accounts and stronger customer loyalty stemming from deeper relationships and association with brokerage platforms - Customer loyalty and brand equity are often based as much on perception as personal experience with a brand - The sizable gap between Stars and Drifters in customer loyalty suggests that those with lower scores may have a difficult time maintaining current clients, let alone capturing new ones Fund Company Rankings: Stars1.Vanguard Group*2.Fidelity Investments* Leaders3.American Funds4.RiverSource* 5.Schwab/Laudus Funds* 6.T. Rowe Price* 7.Wells Fargo Funds* 8.JPMorgan Funds* 9.Morgan Stanley Investment Advisors* 10.Smith Barney/Legg Mason* 11.Fidelity Advisor Funds 12.OppenheimerFunds 13.ING Funds* Players14.Merrill Lynch/BlackRock*15.Principal Financial* 16.Davis Funds 17.American Century* 18.The Hartford 19.Franklin Templeton 20.Dodge & Cox 21. Janus 22. John Hancock 23. MFS Investment Management 24. Van Kampen 25. Lord Abbett 26. DWS Scudder Funds 27. Putnam Investments 28. Goldman Sachs Funds 29. Neuberger Berman 30. Evergreen Investments 31. Oakmark Drifters32. Calamos33. Dreyfus Funds* 34. AllianceBernstein 35. PIMCO 36. Columbia Funds 37. AIM 38. Eaton Vance *Indicates that the firm has,or until recently had, an affiliatedbrokerage platform Printed from: MFWire.com/story.asp?s=16221 Copyright 2007, InvestmentWires, Inc. All Rights Reserved |