There is a peculiar moment in the life of an investment firm. The returns may be respectable. The partners may be clever. The research may be first-rate. Yet an allocator opens a browser, scans a website full of photographs of glass towers and discovers that the firm believes in “rigor,” “partnership” and “long-term thinking.” So, apparently, does everyone else.
Peregrine Communications has spent more than two decades in that moment. The company works for asset managers, hedge funds, private-equity and private-credit firms, private banks and wealth managers. It does the familiar agency things - media relations, crisis counsel, brand identity, websites, films, social posts, paid campaigns. The less familiar part is its insistence that all of those activities begin with a diagnosis. Before adding volume, find out whether the market can hear anything distinctive at all.
That is the company in miniature: a communications shop that thinks like the people it serves. Research the field. Find the edge. Choose where to place conviction. Measure the result.
The problem with excellent performance
Anthony Payne founded Peregrine in 2003 after running Hill & Knowlton Financial. In those days, investment marketing could still lean hard on the numbers. Then came the financial crisis, a collapse in trust and an internet that allowed investors to inspect a firm before anyone from business development reached the room. Performance remained essential, but it stopped being a complete identity.
Peregrine’s early proposition was an outsourced communications function. It expanded into something closer to an outsourced marketing department. A client might need a sharper corporate message, a press office, a redesigned website, an executive video, investor materials, LinkedIn advertising and a system for seeing which audiences responded. Those are often sold by separate specialists. Peregrine keeps public relations, creative work and digital marketing together, with investment management as the common language.
“Branding is fast becoming an evaluation factor.”Max Hilton, on why overwhelmed investors use brands as filters
The customer is not a consumer searching for a new checking account. It is often an institutional decision-maker, an intermediary or an increasingly important private-wealth audience trying to judge an opaque, complicated promise. The work is B2B, high-trust and usually long-cycle. Peregrine earns project and retainer fees; it does not publish a menu of prices because the brief can range from a website to a transaction, a reputational threat or a multi-market campaign.
The working sequence
The agency built a measuring instrument
Most agencies can explain what they made. Peregrine became more interesting when it started trying to explain what the market was doing. Its annual Global 100 research benchmarks the largest asset managers across ten integrated-marketing measures. By the 2025 edition, the study drew on more than 12,000 newly collected data points and a historical pool approaching 100,000.
The Brand Diagnostic measures presence: awareness, media performance, digital maturity and related signals. Peregrine Frame, introduced in 2025, asks a more uncomfortable question: is the positioning recognizably yours? The tool extracts prominent messages from public material, groups them into themes and scores how distinctive they are. One finding was comic in its precision. More than 90 percent of the firms studied counted client-centricity among their three leading messages. The phrase intended to signal attention had become evidence of crowd behavior.
This research does two jobs. It gives chief marketing officers a benchmark for board conversations. It also gives Peregrine a point of view before a pitch begins. The agency is no longer merely saying, “You need more attention.” It can say where visibility is weak, which competitors own a topic and whether a client’s favorite words belong to half the industry.
A case study in small things compounding
Cube Infrastructure Managers came to Peregrine in 2021 with an enviable commercial problem: it knew it was good at infrastructure investing and struggled to make that difference legible. Peregrine helped position Cube as a value creator in essential local infrastructure. The campaign mixed corporate and deal announcements, English- and French-language media work, advertising, social content and a five-part video series about portfolio companies in mobility, telecoms and digital infrastructure.
From June 2023 to June 2024, Peregrine reported a doubling of Cube’s brand awareness, more than 250 pieces of coverage, over 320,000 LinkedIn impressions, more than 22,000 engagements and follower growth of 37 percent. The useful detail is not that social media worked. It is that the same positioning traveled through press, advertising and video. Each channel repeated the investment story in its own accent.
That integrated model distinguishes Peregrine from a general PR firm and from a collection of freelancers. Its narrow industry focus also reduces the briefing tax. Staff are expected to understand allocators, fund structures, private markets and the peculiar etiquette of financial media. The tradeoff is equally clear: specialization is powerful when the client’s problem is investment-management reputation. It is much less useful for a mass-market product needing retail distribution, celebrity culture or a global consumer launch.
The reader can steal the sequence
The most portable part of Peregrine is not its client list. It is the order of operations. Many companies begin with output: we need a podcast, a video, three posts a week. Peregrine begins with position. What do customers currently associate with us? What do competitors already own? Which claim can we support with evidence? Only then does content become useful.
A five-question brand audit
- Ask three customers what they think you are unusually good at.
- Write down the three claims repeated most often on your website.
- Compare those claims with five competitors - identical language is not positioning.
- Choose one evidence-backed idea and express it across earned, owned and paid channels.
- Measure recognition, qualified response and behavior, not the sheer count of posts.
It will not rescue a weak product, create investment performance or manufacture trust during a crisis when facts point the other way. Nor is every business ready for an integrated program. The method works when leadership can agree on a position, subject-matter experts will contribute and the firm has enough patience to repeat a useful idea. It fails when each partner insists on a different story, compliance removes every specific noun, or the quarterly demand for novelty defeats consistency.
In 2022, Payne handed day-to-day leadership to Max Hilton and Josh Cole as co-CEOs and moved into an executive-chairman role. The transition suited a firm preoccupied with long horizons. Hilton had joined in 2008 and opened New York in 2015; Cole had led strategy. Peregrine now operates from New York, London and Los Angeles, with partner agencies extending its reach farther afield.
The next problem is already arriving. Investors, journalists and advisers increasingly ask AI systems to summarize a firm before visiting its website. Search once arranged links; generative systems assemble a narrative. Peregrine has added generative-engine optimization and AI-mediated brand perception to its vocabulary, but the old lesson survives the new technology. If a company does not know what makes it distinct, the machine will not invent a flattering answer. It will average the company into its category.
That may be Peregrine’s sharpest observation. Reputation is not decoration applied after the serious work. In a crowded market, it is the second portfolio - made of ideas, evidence and accumulated recognition. It compounds slowly. It can be misallocated. And someone ought to be watching it.