SBI MF Tops Nielsen's Brand Equity Index For 2007

SBI Mutual Fund leads Nielsen's Brand Equity Index in the 2007 Winning Brands Mutual Fund, a premier study that tracks the brand performance of various mutual fund houses. The Nielsen Winning Brands Mutual Fund study, in its third year, polled 1,662 Indian consumers via face-to-face interviews across 10 cities in India.

As the findings reveal, Reliance Mutual Fund has emerged as a runner up with the fastest growth, almost doubling its index score from the previous year, and jumping from fifth to the second position in 2007. Last year's runner up, ICICI Prudential, slipped to the number three position, albeit very close behind Reliance.

It's worth noting that this year saw the absolute indices of some of the dominant brands like SBI, Prudential, UTI and HDFC appear much lower than in the previous year.

On average, consumers' awareness of the investment related brands went up from 12.9 brands last year to 18.5 brands in 2007, showing a significant increase. However, the average number of brands in a consumer's consideration set went up slightly from 2.76 to 3.4, which implies a strong need to build brand consideration. This is even more important as Indian consumers are increasingly investing their discretionary money into stocks and mutual funds, according to a global consumer confidence and opinion survey conducted at the end of April 2007.