Advertising, News, The WorkMark Darbyshire | Mar 1, 2018

Nikko Asset Management debuts ﬁrst global
corporate brand campaign
Before stepping onto a global stage, one of Asia’s largest asset managers hadto distill a list of brand attributes—and ﬁnd an agency willing to create thework in Japan.

Before Stefanie Drews and her team could begin to take on the challenge of
the ﬁrst global corporate brand advertising campaign for Nikko AssetManagement, she ﬁrst had to deﬁne the ﬁrm’s unifying brand attributes.
Nikko AM president and CEO Takumi Shibata had made it clear since taking thehelm several years before that the ﬁrm should go from a local business model
to a fully integrated global one. He decided that the ﬁrm’s internal stakeholders
and its clients werebest placed to identify its deﬁning attributes, providing a clear direction for thisﬁrst stage of the project.
Drews is the joint global head of product and marketing at the Tokyo-based
Nikko AM, one of Asia’s largest asset managers. Operating across the globe, theﬁrm has nearly US$200 billion in total assets under management. Confronting
Drews was the reality that many of the ﬁrm’s international oﬃces wereacquisitions from disparate backgrounds, where recognition of the Nikko AM
name was sometimes very limited. In the home market of Japan, it has retailand institutional businesses.
Her team set about enlisting each of Nikko AM’s business streams and theclients they serve in a bottom-up drive to work out the attributes that best
describe the ﬁrm. “We made sure that everyone was engaged in this.” The teamdistilled down the attributes until it found three that everyone agreed on. Theﬁrst was Progressive Solutions that Nikko AM aligns to the goals of investors.
The second was Performance, as the ﬁrm’s primary focus is on delivering realvalue for clients. The third was Global Citizen with Asian DNA, as the ﬁrm
leverages its diverse makeup to help clients navigate dynamic investment
markets.
"All those who contributed in-house to identifying our key attributes
are those who work closely with our clients every single day.
A topdown campaign would have been easier, but it simply wouldn’t
have been credible.”—Stefanie Drews, Nikko AM“With these cohesive brand attributes in place,” said Drews, “we could move tothe next stage, which was a global campaign. It was quite a learning curve for
us because our campaigns had always been local. But we now wanted a globallyconsistent campaign that we could also localize to the needs of stakeholders ineach of our markets.” Depending on regions, brand messages to externalaudiences state “Solutions” or “Innovation”, followed by the foregrounds andbackground images of diﬀerent markets in which Nikko AM operates and has
investment capabilities. Drews noted that the Japan institutionalfocusedadvertisement, for example, includes an image of Denmark because of theﬁrm’s success in the Danish covered bonds space.
“In putting the campaign together, we wanted to work with an agency that istruly Tokyobased, with people who are ﬂuent in both English and Japanese,"
said Drews. "The agency needed to ‘get’ both the global and Japanese angles
for our campaign.” Oliver Ormrod, Nikko AM’s International Communications
Group manager, added, “We spoke with a lot of global agencies but theirJapanese staﬀers focused fully on implementation. They proposed to havepartners overseas do all the creative work, but we wanted to drive theprocess from our Tokyo head oﬃce.”
Drews noted, “Most candidates did not work out because they simply did notunderstand this need. Ultimately, only Tokyo’s Ad-comm Group demonstrated
that it could bring an international print and digital campaign into and out ofJapan. We also really appreciated that it was so willing to engage creatively. We
didn’t quite know what we wanted. We just knew where we wanted to be.
Ad-comm was able to put together something that simply and eﬀectively
presented all countries relevant to our business and reﬂected our brandattributes.”
With the agency in place, Drews tasked Joshua Sato, a strategist for theproduct and marketing division, to put together a print and digital media plan in
conjunction with all oﬃces. The focus was on pursuing a highly targeted
advertising approach. In the United States, for example, ads are going inPensions & Investments. EMEA publications include Citywire and Fund Europe.
In Japan, outlets include Nenkin Joho for print and the print and online editionsof Nikkei Asian Review. “Following the campaign our next step is to measure
how much our brand awareness has grown globally. We will look to also assess
the impact of our brand and campaign by using a range of analytics primarily
from our digital advertising.”
Drews noted: “One great outcome was that we obtained very solid buy-in
throughout the whole process. All those who contributed in-house toidentifying our key attributes are those who work closely with our clients every
single day. A top-down campaign would have been easier, but it simply
wouldn’t have been credible.”
Source: Campaign Asia-Paciﬁc