The MFS campaign 100 years in the making

In investment management, track record and stability are two key pillars upon which to build a marketing campaign.

They indicate how the company has achieved long-term performance and succeeded in growing its client base in a range of market conditions.

Therefore, marking a centenary in business would be quite the occasion for any asset manager, but for MFS Investment Management, the celebration has come with an even greater significance – and opportunity.

The Boston-headquartered manager was established in 1924 through the launch of the world’s first open[1]ended mutual fund.

Still operating today, with $6.5bn in client assets, The Massachusetts Investment Trust opened up capital markets to retail investors in a secure, structured, and transparent way. In turn, it sparked a global, multi-trillion-dollar industry that continues to develop.

This industry employs millions of people and enables funding for tens of thousands of global businesses.

With the average lifespan of the largest listed US companies reaching just 21 years in 2022, according to the S&P500, the company had a lot to shout about.

“To our US market, having 100 years is a big deal,” says Hannah Davis, senior director of corporate communications at MFS.

“In some of the global markets where the brand recognition isn’t as high, it can really help us differentiate ourselves and get our name out there – especially as we also established the first mutual fund.”

There’s business and brand value in such milestones as clients want to work with managers with a long heritage and track record and who know what they’re doing, says Davis.

Faced with an opportunity that is both calendar-driven and central to much of the world’s financial services ecosystem, it would be easy to boast about the past and rest on its laurels. But that’s not what MFS did.

No vanity project

“It was so important to MFS to not be vain about this kind of stuff; not making it about us,” says Davis. “It was very much in our blood to look through the lens of ‘why does this matter?’ and ‘how does this demonstrate value to the end investor or clients?’”

With more than $600bn in client assets around the world, MFS could have used the centenary to really hit the sales trail hard and climb up the global rankings from 46, according to Cerulli in 2022, towards peers with trillions under management.

But the privately owned manager demurred. “The main focus was to ask ourselves: what does the 100 years mean for clients?” says Lucy Davidson, global marketing director.

“What matters are the lessons we’ve learned and how we apply it today for their benefit.

In fact, the team didn’t run a specific campaign around either centenary at all, preferring to embed it within outreach and events it was already scheduling for existing and potential clients, along with purpose-driven internal comms. Of course, stories on its website and a soon-to-publish coffee table book detail the 100-year story, but don’t expect a full-throttle marketing, comms, and sales push.

“We’re lucky to have a leadership team and organisation that values marketing and communications very highly,” says Davis.

“They recognise the importance of not just bringing the dollars in the door or growing assets under management. It’s about differentiating ourselves as a partner for our clients.

“To do that, you have to think about how to educate your clients and you can’t do that without marketing and communications’ support.”

This approach was a key element to the subtlety’s success. It weaved the story around the lessons for clients within engagement opportunities, says Davidson.

“It’s created an opportunity for us to engage with clients not specifically around the birthday but to tell the story,” she says.

“We hosted multiple client appreciation dinners. [President and Global Head of Distribution] Carol [Geremia] has used it as a platform to tell the ‘bigger game story’ around the industry. It’s not ‘100 years of MFS’ it just underpins our story about being a long-term investor and our commitment to the industry.”

Being committed to the industry has meant the company has faced and overcome a range of challenges – but that all feeds into the story, says Davis.

“We looked at volatility and other things that impact our clients today. Our history is a great example of how this isn’t new for MFS.”

Using some of the more precarious moments the industry has suffered helped Hannah’s team to demonstrate the experience and leadership that got MFS through, and it translates to how they serve clients today.

“A lot of advisors we work with, even newer members of our own staff, haven’t seen a down market,” says Davis.

“MFS has been here through wars, recession, the Great Depression – a whole gamut of market conditions. Through our history we could showcase it. We have the track record, cumulative knowledge, built over all sorts of environments.

“We have passed all this down through our culture and lessons learned, which is an important part of who we are.”

Telling the story

These lessons have transformed MFS from a group of investors with a vision to an operation employing more than 2,000 staff around the globe.

There have been challenges to its own business model too, but Davis was keen to build that into the story.

An active manager since 1924, in 1932, MFS was one of the first investment houses to create its own in-house research team, rather than use information the rest of the market shared. It launched its second fund in 1934, when many in the market were losing their shirts.

A century on, and the rise of the passive investment industry – offering low fees and easy liquidity – has taken a bite out of the flows and profits the active sector had enjoyed for decades.

“The state of the industry is a big part of what helped make that an easy sell [to our leadership],” says Davis.

“Recognising that today’s industry is facing a lot of pressure from passive and from short-term thinking in investing, we have been able to show people the cyclical and volatile nature of this industry and how that demonstrates a need for long-termism, and managers that understand.”

A key element of landing this message is getting buy in from the business – some of whom might have wanted to go bigger on the mutual fund birthday theme. “Hannah’s team did a really good job thinking about the culture of the firm and who we are,” says Davidson.

“There were salespeople who may have been thinking they were just going to send birthday cupcakes to advisors, but Hannah’s team gave them a great framework of messaging to work with.

“This explained why weren’t going out to say, ‘We’re 100 years old’, but ‘what have we learned?’ and ‘How do we bring this to our clients today?’”

And they believe it has worked.

“It’s really important to have the connectivity from the brand-level campaign right down to the sales teams and that everybody’s aligned behind it,” says Davidson.

“Otherwise, you’d end up with great brand messaging and salespeople running birthday parties in Minnesota.”

Top-to-bottom buy in

The company was able to pull off this hugely connected piece of work by bringing everyone along and ensuring everyone knew they had a part to play.

“I’ve never worked internal comms for a company before where they’ve been so invested and hands on with even the way they communicate to their people,” says Davis.

“We were very lucky to have that that kind of acknowledgement and partnership with our leaders at the top.”

But the buy in was just the beginning and kick started a huge amount of work.

“Early on, our planning team figured out which roles and responsibilities were going to be needed to make the project a success. Some of this we knew in advance and other parts we learned along the way,” says Davis.

“We first had to think about which internal resources were required for that intimate knowledge versus just bringing in additional skill and manpower.”

For MFS, having its own people close to the storytelling was important to ensure it all connected back to clients and purpose. Then, an ‘all hands on deck approach,’ ensued, culminating in the final quarter leading up to 1 January 2024.

“Everyone recognised it was the top priority for the firm and they were excited to work on it,” says Davis.

“We helped people prioritise tasks because it’s a calendar[1]driven event so there was no room for slippage.”

Communication and early planning were vital, starting around two years in advance with the onboarding of agencies that would support and supplement the internal team to dig into and update the company archives that would illustrate and give life to the project. Then it was “go” time.

“Visioning sessions brought different groups together,” says Davis. “We had both tenured employees and newbies to help us figure out what makes our history special. What would we want a campaign like this to look like? What would success look like for us? And we had one-on-ones with members of the leadership team.”

Toggle exercises allowed teams to consider options for how it would take shape – anything from understated to bold; traditional or modern. Using a range of criteria, everyone could put their marker where they thought it should be.

“We didn’t want the look and feel or messaging to be overly traditional or appear to be stuck in the 1920s,” says Davis.

“Instead, we wanted to reflect where we are today and where are we headed. And how our story can help us.”

Moments that matter

An agency surfaced a treasure trove of documents, which were added to by current staff or previous employees and stakeholders who wanted to be part of the project, but MFS stayed in control of the project.

“The agency came out with “40 Moments that Made Us,” which had some really interesting things for employees,” says Davidson, but the team quickly realised it wasn’t using the external lens to show which of them would be relevant to clients.

“We want our people to be proud and knowledgeable about the past, but many of these points didn’t necessarily pass externally,” says Davis.

“The agency was quick to be in the promotional space, but for us, the purpose of our campaign wasn’t about showing how we were made. It was about the moments that really showed our influence in the industry and our ability to serve our clients.

“We were probably driving them insane with our nuances – but it was important.” The repositioned “40 moments that Mattered” drove much of the externally facing project, highlighting where the company’s founders had led, handing over the responsibility for “A Century of Wealth Creation for All” – the MFS project tag line – to its successors, who the team needed to keep engaged.

“The more we had other voices involved and people felt they were kept up to speed with the direction we were heading in, the fewer hiccups we encountered along the way,” says Davis.

“People were so passionate about this project and had high expectations. You need to bring people along and help them understand why you made those decisions, have their ideas heard.”

Davis, Davidson, and their teams attended many global team meetings, talking through the centenary toolkit and the events or occasions that were coming up.

They needed all areas of the business – from HR to accounting to front of house – to be part of and aligned to the project with both their internal and external outreach and daily duties.

“It was vital to have a toolkit that provided the company with building blocks giving consistency through the materials and the messaging and the vision,” says Davis.

“They can use it all easily; no one has to reinvent the wheel. It was the same with the visual identity, which helped keep the agency on track and made sure that we weren’t reinventing the wheel every time a new project popped up.”

Having this all in place meant the team could jump on new opportunities relatively nimbly, using partnerships as a key additional element to empower the project and spread it to an even wider audience.

For example, the Investment Company Institute trade organisation and State Street, the MIT launch custodian, were keen to get in on the celebration, participating in a range of activities.

“We were driving it as an MFS initiative to start with, but quickly realised that we have built a lot of relationships over the years and we can leverage those to make it a louder, more impactful and meaningful splash,” says Davis.

Measuring success

At the midpoint of the centenary year, has the project been a success so far? The company’s largest ever client party in Madrid in May would suggest so, along with multiple additional touchpoints created.

“We will look at brand awareness and favourability scores the next time we do that exercise,” says Davidson. “We’re not anticipating a massive lift, because we didn’t put millions of dollars into advertising our 100th anniversary, but it’s important to look at it.”

In June, MFS launched an employee experience survey. It has questions about pride in the company, which Davidson says will be a good barometer and is hopeful of encouraging numbers.

For Davis, one of the key measurements of success for the project was seeing it all hang together after two years of planning and execution.

“Once we saw the final pieces come together, we knew we had it right,” she says.

“When you’re writing one piece at a time, it’s not easy to see if it is working. But watching the first of our four-part docuseries I saw how impactful it was; how meaningful and momentous.

“These were big moments in history – we were there for our clients, and we were leading. We weren’t sitting on the sidelines waiting to see what happened.”

And the teams are not sitting on the sidelines now, already thinking about how to extend the campaign and momentum they have built into the future, says Davis.

“We want to be clearer about who we are, how we talk about ourselves through competitive brand positioning,” she says.

“We’re going to spend some more time on that to really make sure we have that alignment across the whole, entire organisation, especially distribution.”

MFS is also building an archival programme so the marketing and comms teams in 2124 have a little less digging to do, while the whole exercise has inspired the team around its brand initiatives.

“There’s lots of work underway to think about how we improve the client and employee experience,” says Davis. “We have a phenomenal foundation to start from and will continue to evolve over the next 100 years.”