The Little Billboard That Could
Fränzo Friedrich, Head of Marketing at Momentum Investments shares the lessons learnt when they put up a billboard to embody the company’s brand and what this ultimately meant.
At the end of 2019, Momentum Investments threw a challenge at their agency. The brief was simple: Create a concept to convey the purpose of Momentum Investments’ brand. With Momentum, investing is personal and that’s why they appreciate that every person’s investment journey is unique. They also believe in the power of sound financial advice that can guide a person through this journey. Their behavioural finance team has done a lot of research to understand what drives investor behaviour during different market cycles.
They realised that a key ingredient to investment success is the ability to remain calm when others are panicking. To remain invested when others are disinvesting or moving their money to safer asset classes, only to re-invest when it’s too late, destroying value in the process. That’s not to say it’s always wrong to use different investment strategies. There are good examples of tapping into new opportunities as they’ve seen with investors diversifying their investments when Regulation 28’s offshore allowance was relaxed. A person’s investment goals can change because of specific life events such as retrenchment or early retirement. But, if nothing has changed, their investment goals shouldn’t.
That’s the key message their agency came up with. They thought it would be a great short and to-the-point message on a billboard (yes, only one!) in an environment that would see a whole lot of change. And that the billboard should stay the same for five years – the minimum time an investor would be ideally invested in a unit trust. They scouted different locations and saw the ideal spot for the billboard – Solomon Mahlangu Drive — close to where a new mall and housing development was to be built. They thought the dramatic changes in this area would be a great metaphor for the markets, as things change quickly and often like the ups and downs of investing.
Little did they know exactly how much things would change. The billboard went up at the start of 2020 with the message, ‘When the world changes, your investment goals shouldn’t’, just a couple of months before COVID-19 hit. Predictably, they saw some people reacting to the falling markets in the first couple of weeks after lockdown came into effect in exactly the way they shouldn’t. They changed course, only returning to their original investment strategies after the market corrected. And they lost a heck of a lot of money as a result.
Since those early days of 2020, the billboard also experienced several challenges. Originally, the timer on the billboard included days, months and years, but due to load shedding, it didn’t always tick over. This made them realise that, just like investors shouldn’t watch their investment values daily, they should stick to big numbers in months and years. They send out quarterly statements for a reason. Then, in 2022 the billboard got stolen. It was another dark night due to load shedding, making it easier for thieves to pounce. Somewhere someone is sitting with a beautifully crafted investment billboard hopefully up on a big wall somewhere. They quickly replaced the billboard and received many compliments from consumers on social media that they stuck to their guns. One of them even proposed that they change the wording to indicate how long it’s been up – pretty ironic as they say emphatically on it that they won’t change it. They also had to move the billboard as the road it was on, had to be broadened to cope with all the additional traffic in the area. They’ve been sharing the change in the surrounding area on their social media pages over the last couple of years and it is astounding to see just how much it has changed.
But with all the dramatic events surrounding the billboard and in the markets, the last 3 and a half years, they have continued to deliver good results for their clients and their advisers. They also have the most comprehensive set of investment solutions, underpinned by cutting-edge research and insights to help people on their investment journey. With Momentum Investments, investing is personal and nothing is more personal for clients than achieving their desired investment outcomes.
