•  
• Tweet
•  
•  
•        Print
•  
•        Email
•  
•         Track Keywords

AQR Capital Management, Bridgewater Associates, Renaissance Technologies, Lighthouse Investment Partners and FORT took the top five spots in the Alternatives & Hedge Fund category among the institutional investors using eVestment, according to the new report.

The Brand Awareness Rankings is the only report that looks at the asset management firms and hedge funds with the greatest brand awareness in the institutional market, with findings segmented by global, regional, asset class, assets under management (AUM) and other categories. The report also offers insights into how firms stack up to their competition in terms of brand awareness, helping firms gauge the impact of their efforts to build and maintain brand awareness among institutional investors and consultants via their database marketing, advertising, conference/event marketing and other efforts.

The rankings take into account the level of interest consultants and asset owners demonstrate at both the firm and the product levels by viewing firm and product profiles in eVestment, widely regarded as the market's most comprehensive database of institutional managers and strategies.

A key finding of the report is a strong correlation between brand awareness and completion rates for the data managers report to eVestment. Firms with high brand awareness scores on average have three times the data completion rates of those firms with low brand awareness scores. These results further validate that managers hoping to improve awareness of their brands in the institutional market need to begin by reporting the data consultants and investors want.

Beyond database marketing, other efforts such as conference appearances, industry speeches, advertising and social media campaigns can increase brand awareness scores by driving asset owners and allocators to review firm and product profiles on eVestment.

"Building and maintaining high brand awareness is a key element of raising institutional AUM," said eVestment Global Head of Research Peter Laurelli. "eVestment brand awareness rankings and other viewership metrics give marketing, database, distribution and consultant relations teams the ability to quantify interest in their brand and monitor changes over time."

According to Laurelli, branding is a critical complement to marketing efforts focused on lead generation and prospecting. "High brand awareness makes it more likely that investors and consultants will take a look at your products, accept your requests for meetings, visit your website, consume your thought leadership or take other actions that ultimately lead to new business," he said. "In short, high brand awareness lays the groundwork for new mandates."