How To Market Unit Trusts: A Consumer Behaviour Model

How can the unit trust industry expand its customer base? To date, although public interest in equity investment has spread widely since the 1984 launch of the major privatisation flotations, unit trusts still attract only about the same number and types of investors as before. Three‐quarters of the population say they have never considered buying them. A model of how consumers buy financial products and data from a series of large‐sample surveys are used to show that the main problem — and potentially the solution — lies not in adverse attitudes, nor lack of product awareness, but in people's feeling that they do not understand unit trusts and would not consider buying them unless they understood them a lot better.