With returns in the double digits, mutual fund marketing experienced a heyday in the mid- to late 1990’s. In those days, it seemed you could run an ad in Money Magazine, and the money would pour in. Socially responsible investing (SRI) funds soared along with other funds, in no small part because technology companies slipped smoothly through many of the exclusionary screens that characterized SRI funds.
The Ciscos and Intels of the world were environmentally clean, they were good places to work and they weren’t marketing unhealthy products (that is, if you discounted the effect on eyesight from spending hours in front of a monitor).
However, as retail investors began to suffer significant losses on the backside of the 90’s tech bubble, they did two things: many of them began paying more attention to the relative quality of their mutual fund investments, and many more threw up their hands and ran to investment advisors shouting, “Please, save me from myself!”
These trends were in no way friendly to SRI fund families. Many shareholders headed for the exits because SRI funds’ performance took a disproportional hit in concert with the tech sector collapse. Even more damaging, registered investment advisors (RIAs) and wealth managers, the mainstays of the advisor market, were either generally ignorant of or skeptical about SRI mutual funds.
Fast forward to the mid-2000s. Joe Keefe, President and CEO of one of SRI’s pioneers, Pax World, in essence called out the socially responsible investment community at its annual gathering at the SRI in the Rockies conference. Criticizing the community’s reliance on negative screening to make investment decisions, Joe delivered a speech that could only be construed as a wake-up call. His message was simple: stop talking about what you don’tinvest in and start talking about what you do invest in. Let the world know that your investment targets are forward-looking companies focused on innovation, strong employee relations and long-term performance. Qualities like these, Joe told a standing room only audience, define a better-run company with fewer downside risks, and it’s those companies that are likely to achieve long-term sustainable performance thanks to their better business practices.
Shortly thereafter, 360 was named agency of record for Pax World. We helped to introduce and popularize a new, more positive variant of SRI investing – one Pax called Sustainable Investing. We created an integrated campaign targeting investment advisors, wealth managers and broker-dealers that generated awareness for the approach and inextricably associated it with Pax World.
Today, the term sustainable investing is widely recognized – so much so, in fact, that many of Pax’s competitors have incorporated it in their own branding and communications. Pax World – and 360 – are glad to share the term and to have played key roles it popularizing it.
