Hi, I’m Julian Scarfe. I run Fundzen alongside creative director Richard Sakic, and we help asset management, fintechs and financial advisory organizations with their marketing efforts.
To be good at that kind of work requires a few skill sets: a) good old-fashioned creative direction, b) technical competency in the changing digital landscape; and c) a keen understanding of how investors make decisions, which is what this blog is about. Not just retail investors, but everyone in the investing pipeline, from portfolio managers with billion dollar portfolios, to your grandma and the cash under her mattress.
The internet and traditional news channels talk about investing all the time. We talk about what happened today in the markets. We talk about company earnings, trends, technical indicators, and patterns. Cold, rational data. We talk about investing and saving and retirement planning. We talk about investing as if it’s not a product or a purchase and indeed, in critical ways, it is substantially different from buying a car or a dress. But it’s amazing to me how little we talk about the ways it’s the same: decisions about what we can do with our money, stories we believe in about our future and our happiness and who we are and who we want to be… and how those with an fresh idea to sell choose to engage with our imaginations; and how the emotional parts of our brains inevitably are at the heart of any decision – especially risk-based ones.
I hope if you’re in this world – financial advisors, portfolio managers, brokers, or even advertising folks with financial sector clients – that you’ll find the explorations here interesting. We’ll be looking at the world of neuroscience & marketing psychology; studying the marketing of real-world financial products and brands; drawing parallels in the world of consumer goods marketing & retail brands; and more.
And I’d be happy to have you connect on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.