Advisors started putting NEI back on the shelf
A repositioned story that moved NEI from forgettable to front-of-mind with the advisors who drive the business.
Client: NEI Investments
Sector: B2B financial services (asset management)
Stage: Established firm, advisor-driven distribution
Foundation addressed: Market Understanding, Message Coherence
Audience: Financial advisors recommending funds to their clients
The Situation
NEI Investments has been one of Canada's longest-standing champions of responsible investing, building a full suite of actively managed mutual funds and portfolios long before ESG became a category. The products performed. The fees were competitive. The firm had decades of presence in the market.
What the firm had built over that time was a reputation for integrity. What the firm had not fully translated was why an advisor today should put an NEI fund into a client portfolio instead of something flashier or more familiar.
The Challenge
The issue surfaced in the data and in the wholesaler conversations at the same time. NEI funds were not showing up in advisor portfolios at the rate the product quality justified. Performance was not the reason. Perception was.
The brand had grown dusty. Messaging leaned on legacy rather than relevance. Advisors could not articulate a sharp reason to choose NEI over alternatives, which meant wholesalers could not either. Internally, sales and marketing were working from different playbooks. Campaigns felt disconnected. Activity was high. Conviction was low.
In a sea of sameness, the firms that win advisor mindshare are the ones whose story is sharp enough to travel from a wholesaler conversation into a client meeting. NEI's story was not traveling.
The Work
The foundation NEI needed was a story built on what their actual audience, financial advisors, cared about today.
The engagement started with listening. Qualitative interviews with advisors surfaced how they were choosing products, what decision drivers actually mattered in their practice, and what was missing from NEI's current brand narrative. A clear, actionable ideal customer profile was built out from those interviews, grounded in real advisor behaviour and decision patterns.
An audit of every piece of existing messaging followed. Brochures, website, wholesaler scripts, campaign assets. The diagnosis named where consistency broke down and where the firm's story stopped landing.
From that research came the reframe. A new brand narrative was built, anchored in what mattered most to advisors: ease, trust, and differentiated thinking in a sea of sameness. The narrative was then rolled out across the website, advisor decks, and campaign assets, so every touchpoint told the same story.
The final layer was team enablement. Wholesalers and marketing received a shared playbook so every conversation, every meeting, and every piece of collateral carried the same conviction. The story stopped varying depending on who was in the room.
Foundation Addressed
Market Understanding and Message Coherence
NEI's marketing was speaking from legacy rather than to the advisor making today's decision. Rebuilding the narrative on real advisor research, then aligning every touchpoint and every wholesaler conversation to that narrative, is what moved consideration and relevance.
The Outcome
Follow-up advisor surveys measured the shift. Brand consideration rose 36%. Perceived relevance rose 44%. Wholesalers reported more confident conversations and more meetings booked, with fewer cycles spent explaining what NEI was.
Marketing's posture shifted as a result. Campaigns stopped defaulting to product push and started positioning the firm as a thinking partner for advisors, not just a fund provider. The story traveled without the wholesaler needing to translate it.
“When the story is built on what your audience actually cares about, wholesalers stop selling and start being invited in. That is the difference between a brand that is known and a brand that is chosen.”
Is your story traveling?
If your sales team is working hard but the message is not landing, or if your brand carries a reputation that no longer matches the business, the fix is usually in the foundation, not the campaign. Book a call and we will talk through what rebuilding the narrative on real audience research would look like for your company.