eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Purpose of the study The relationship between mutual fund performance and fund flows has been studied widely, but less attention has been given towards mutual fund launches and their success. For services the company itself plays as the brand, and thus product launch can be viewed as brand line extension. This paper investigates the importance of brand performance, company track record, on the success of mutual fund launch. In Finland the mutual fund industry can be divided roughly into two types of players, retail and non-retail banks, and there fore they will be also investigated separately and the results will be compared.

The study was performed on the Finnish mutual fund market and it includes virtually all mutual fund launches between 1997 and 2009. The data is tested using linear regression, and first the significance of the brand performance and additional factors are evaluated based on the whole sample, and later on the importance of the variables for retail and non-retail banks will be compared. Last, the consumer segment will be observed more closely.

The results show that the overall company track record, the brand performance, has positive effect on the success of mutual fund launch. When the two company types were compared separately it was found that the company track record plays more important role for non-retail bank investors whereas for retail bank investors other company and fund related variables were found to be more important. Similar conclusions were made within the consumer segment.