The Market for Socially Responsible Investments
Marketing and Sales Strategy
Serving the more progressive investor market of Cultural Creatives with traditional financial products is difficult and often uncomfortable. This discomfort is felt by both investors and their professional advisors, as well as by conventional investment product providers. Understanding how to help them meet their special needs is a challenge for financial professionals. Cultural Creatives' penchant for relationships and community, their desire to know and feel good about where a product comes from, how it was designed, and who the company is behind the product, makes them a very different market for financial services.
Exciting business opportunities for Northern lie in providing social investment products and services delivered in ways that resonate with the mostly untapped market of Cultural Creatives in the United States. The company intends to develop win-win relationships with 20-30 broker/dealer firms within the first 18 months of operations by offering an attractive package of unique services focused on the socially aware investor. The Company will focus on serving Cultural Creatives nationwide primarily through the investment practitioners scattered across the country who know this market. This strategy will effectively leverage our resources and create new distribution capabilities through hundreds of professionals who work directly with thousands of individual and institutional clients fitting the profile of socially aware/Cultural Creative investors.
Northern Investments, as its name suggests, is building a Network of investment professionals who have a need for information, products, and fee-based investment services unavailable through their current broker/dealer relationships. The attraction will be a well capitalized firm whose leadership, vision, mission, culture, commitment, and services are focused on socially aware, environmentally responsible, values-driven investors. The Network will be connected through e-mail and Internet services, through conferences and educational gatherings, and through dynamic personal relationships that will develop between Network members over time. Management envisions growing its Network of representatives from 50 to over 200 in the first 18 months of operations.
The Company is building a marketing and sales capability to promote the concept of socially responsible investing, as well as provide information, education and fee-based products and services to investment advisors nationwide. Northern Investments will develop both "push" and "pull" strategies, aimed at growing the social investment industry and the businesses of investment professionals who join the Network.
A Corporate Culture of Respect
Shared Ownership - Expand Distribution
