Brunswick Survey: 93% of Institutional Investors Say They Won’t Invest Without Trusting Management – Even With Strong Numbers
Brunswick Group’s 2026 US Investor Survey, published in February and based on responses from 100 US institutional active-equity investors split evenly between long-only managers and hedge funds, puts a hard number on something IR teams have long suspected: trust outweighs performance. 93% of respondents said they would not invest in a company without trusting its management, even if the business had strong financials and an attractive opportunity. 85% said they had actually sold a position due to a loss of trust in management.
The survey also quantifies AI’s growing but still-bounded role in investment research. 54% of investors rated GenAI as at least “moderately important” to their research process, and 68% said AI has changed how they approach earnings calls as several described leaning on AI-generated call transcripts to gauge management’s tone, not just its numbers. Yet AI hasn’t displaced human contact: 77% still rank direct C-suite interaction as “important” or “very important,” ahead of company disclosures (66%) and IR conversations (63%). And on the specific driver investors say matters most for confidence “why you will win” it seemded that only 27% said companies communicate this well, versus 61% who said it’s the single biggest confidence driver. That’s the widest gap in the survey.
What this means for fund marketers: This data is corporate-IR-flavored, but the read-through to fund and asset manager marketing is direct. First, trust-building content which includes clear explanations when strategy shifts, specific action plans when performance disappoints, should outrank generic performance messaging in your content calendar; “overpromising and underdelivering” was investors’ single biggest trust-destroyer, cited by 62%. Second, because 47% of investors now rank a company’s own website and IR pages as “important” or “extremely important” sources, and GenAI platforms preferentially surface owned content, your website copy is doing double duty: it’s both investor-facing and the raw material ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity will summarize when an allocator asks about your fund. Firms that let site content go stale are effectively outsourcing their own narrative to whatever AI infers from outdated or third-party material. Third, don’t deprioritize human touchpoints – you know the drill – meetings, calls, conferences in favor of scaled digital content; investors still weight them highest, even as AI reshapes how they process everything around those conversations.
