CMO and VP of Product Strategy outline why they saw a need to rename 11 ETFs and why they think that better serves advisors, DIY investors
Avinash D’Souza and Caroline Grimont saw in Canada’s ETF landscape, a push for plainer language. The two executives at Harvest ETFs, Grimont is Chief Marketing Officer and D’Souza is the VP of Product Strategy, noted that as investors’ interest in and knowledge of specific investment products has grown, clarity has become essential. DIY investors have grown as a large source of demand for ETF companies, while even the traditional advisor channels have shifted towards a focus on clear explanation at a time when KYP regulations and the scale of the product shelf place a significant working burden on the shoulders of advisors.
In service to that demand, Harvest ETFs elected to rebrand 11 of their products into one flagship suite of covered call funds, what they now call their “Income Leaders” category. It’s a move that other independent ETF firms have made in Canada, too, reflecting a focus on the utility and outcome of a product, rather than its particular asset categorization.
“You have shops now recognizing that maybe the tail actually does wag the dog. Maybe we need to focus not just on selling to investors but also speaking to investors in a way that resonates with them in a language that they speak,” D’Souza says. “Most end investors don’t really look at fixed income or U.S. aggregate. It doesn’t really work like that. They look at it in terms of what does it do for us and how do we actually describe it. In a sense it’s more English than finance.”
What followed was the rebranding of 11 different ETFs, with a view to making the language in their names and marketing more investor friendly. Certain bloated names were stripped down to their bare essentials. Grimont and D’Souza note the example of one ETF, formerly called the Harvest Equal Weight Global covered call Utilities Income ETF (HUTL). That was rebranded to the Harvest Utilities Leaders Income ETF, trading under the same ticker.
Grimont notes that the decision to unify this suite with two key words: “income” and “leaders” underlined the common investment thesis espoused at Harvest: large-cap equities with covered call overlays for income.
“We want people to recognize that name,” Grimont says. “The Harvest tech leaders, or equity leaders, or whatever the sector is, it’s the income leaders that they’ll look at.”
While some of the logic behind this rebrand was to reach a more outcome-focused cohort of DIY investors, Grimont and D’Souza add that they believe this rebrand also suits an advisor cohort facing KYP regulations and a crowded product shelf. With the ever-expanding roster of Canadian ETFs, especially ETFs in the covered call category, advisors need to triage. Rather than using an ETF’s name to determine if something is equal weight, globally invested, or the sector it plays in, the name can serve as the first point in the funnel. Harvest elected for that key information to be the sector and the fact that it has income. From there, D’Souza notes that wholesalers can step in to talk with advisors about the underlying mechanisms, like equal weight allocations, the nature of the options strategy, and the geographic allocation in the fund.
The decision for this rebrand wasn’t made in a vacuum, Grimont and D’Souza solicited input from a cohort of “friendlies” both in the advisory channel and in the DIY space. That feedback, and a degree of their own reflection, helped the Harvest team see where past branding inconsistencies had emerged. Now they can approach future launches with a degree of discipline, launching within broad categories where they have established expertise and advantage. D’Souza argues that by leaning on the discipline now baked into their fund language, the team can resist the temptation to ‘overlaunch’ ETFs and focus on what works for DIY investors, what works for advisors, and what works for them. While the internal process of rebranding may seem like a marketing exercise, Grimont and D’Souza argue it has a meaningful impact on how advisors can work with these products day to day.
“Looking at it from a KYP standpoint, it’s so much easier for advisors to identify,” Grimont says. “They know what this is, 20 stocks with a covered call. They get it, they know our process, they know what we’ve been doing for years.”
