Nine out of 10 portfolio managers' marketing is terrible. If that sounds harsh, ask yourself whether you could name three funds off the top of your head. Most people can't name one.

In this episode, Gareth is joined by Giles Swan: public policy and regulatory consultant, former UK financial regulator with 25 years of international experience across investment services, digital assets, and payments, to unpack why fund marketing so rarely moves beyond a monthly fact sheet, a conference presentation, and a portfolio manager on a podcast.

They explore why funds lean on the name of the manager or the brand of the management company instead of building a real narrative for the product itself. They get into why "professional investors only" often becomes an excuse to avoid retail-facing marketing that the content reaches anyway, and how compliance teams can release the handbrake on creative, plain-language communication without stepping outside the rules. They discuss why fund communications are so often overweighted on risk disclosure at the expense of explaining the actual outcome, and what the FCA's Consumer Composite Investments regime signals about the direction regulators want the industry to move. They also look at what fund managers can genuinely learn from crypto marketing — a higher-risk asset class that somehow communicates more clearly, more concisely, and more engagingly than most funds manage to.

The throughline: don't rely on performance alone, and don't forget the top of the funnel: awareness has to come before conversion.

Whether you're rethinking a fund's naming and narrative or trying to get compliance and marketing pulling in the same direction, this episode is a useful reset on what fund marketing could actually look like.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package