How to rebrand stockmarket indices

, and thank you for the invitation to Hieroglyph Capital Partners. You asked us to demonstrate our marketing skills by choosing an aspect of your branding to review. Now, this may be eccentric, but we’ve picked your tracker funds. Hieroglyph’s green-investment programme, its philanthropic work or its industry-leading quantitative analysts are all more obvious candidates for our attention. Tracker funds are dull, and deliberately so: they’re just algorithms that let your investors replicate the performance of stockmarket indices as cheaply as possible. Except for the choice of index, any one is just like all the others. But a nondescript product doesn’t preclude a strong brand—it demands one. Think of airlines. Or perfume. Or lager. More importantly, the boring reasons for preferring passive funds to actively managed ones are getting harder to sell. Investors are happy to buy a low-cost fund that indiscriminately tracks the market’s return when everything is heading in the right direction. But even if they know that virtually no active manager beats the market over the long-term, it gets harder to remember this when they’re losing money. This year, a lot of them have lost a lot. They’re starting to wonder if a good stockpicker could have sheltered them from the worst of it.