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Communicating Secondaries to Multi-Segment Audiences
Secondary investing has always carried a messaging complexity. Even among seasoned LPs, the mechanics, pricing logic, and portfolio-construction benefits aren’t as widely internalized as many managers assume. As more secondaries firms expand beyond the traditional institutional base — into wealth channels, intermediary platforms, and newly PE-curious individual investors — the communication burden has multiplied.
In these environments, clarity isn’t about “simplifying” the strategy. It’s about developing a clear narrative system that meets each audience where they are without diluting the intellectual integrity of the category. This is one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen in our work with secondary managers: firms are no longer just articulating what they do; they are architecting explanations that scale across very different levels of financial fluency.
Why Audience Segmentation Matters More in Secondaries Than Most Managers Realize
Multiple types of investors approach secondaries with entirely different mental models. Some anchor on diversification. Some on the J-curve. Some on liquidity, cash yield, downside protection, or the ability to buy into high-quality portfolios at attractive pricing.
In other words: the audience isn’t monolithic, and neither should the narrative be.
Here’s a simplified illustration we often use in early strategy sessions:
A sophisticated investor might want to know how GP-led and LP-led exposures balance across a portfolio; an individual investor might need to understand what a private equity fund is in the first place. If those two explanations are written in the same paragraph, both audiences lose.
Institutions: Reinforcing Selectivity, Process, and Repeatability
Institutional LPs understand private equity. They understand fund cycles, pricing dynamics, and market structure. Yet secondaries still require more explicit communication than many managers expect.
The reason is subtle: institutions know what secondaries are, but they don’t always know how you do them.
For this group, the narrative must quickly clarify:
- How you source opportunities (without over-indexing on volume)
- What selectivity means in practice
- What your underwriting prioritizes at the asset and fund level
- How your portfolio construction has remained consistent across cycles
One institutional LP told a client of ours during discovery: “I just need to know why your process is reliable in every market environment.” That distinction is important. This is where detailed but digestible frameworks — process diagrams, funnel snapshots, exposure maps — do more work than copy alone.
Advisors and RIAs: The Middle Layer With the A High Communication Burden
Advisors sit in a unique place: they are financially sophisticated, but they are not typically secondaries specialists. They need messaging that answers both “What is it?” and “How do I use it?”
Three principles matter most here:
1. Give advisors language they can use with their clients.
If an RIA cannot confidently repeat your explanation to a client, the strategy won’t scale in the wealth channel.
2. Clarify the role of secondaries in a portfolio.
Anchor on relatable frameworks:
- dampening the J-curve,
- smoothing deployment,
- diversification by vintage and strategy,
- earlier cash yield characteristics.
3. Use structured, modular educational content.
We’ve seen firms succeed with a “Core Concepts” section that breaks down fundamentals in 250–300-word modules — enough to be substantive, not so much that it overwhelms.
Check out Pomona Capital's Insights & Education page. Here, the firm takes the opportunity to answer "What is a secondary?" and "Why invest?" With a page like this, Pomona becomes a source of truth and an educational resource for advisors and prospective investors.
Individual Investors: Beginning the Narrative Earlier Than You Think
For individual investors, especially those accessing private markets for the first time through feeder structures or interval funds, the starting point is not the intricacies of secondaries. It’s understanding private equity itself.
This group needs clarity on:
- How private equity works
- Why companies choose PE capital
- What a fund is
- How primary PE investing differs from secondaries
- Risk framing and liquidity expectations
A table like the one below often accelerates comprehension:
The job of the narrative is not to “sell.” It’s to orient.
Closing Thought
The firms that outperform in communication aren’t the ones who simplify the most. They’re the ones who structure the story so each audience can enter at the right level — and graduate into deeper material as their fluency grows.
A well-architected secondaries narrative has three characteristics:
- Accessible without being reductive
- Scalable across audiences without fragmenting the brand
- Sophisticated enough to build conviction among institutions
When these three conditions are met, firms expand their reach to audiences who may not otherwise engage. A strong secondary strategy may generate returns, but a clear secondary narrative generates momentum.
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Secondary investing is one of the rare corners of private markets where the strategy’s sophistication is a strength. It also creates a communication barrier. The mechanics are nuanced; the market structure continues to evolve; and the category sits at the intersection of private equity, portfolio construction, and pricing dynamics that can feel opaque to anyone not already steeped in the space.
Here’s the tension Darien Group sees most often: when managers try to simplify the strategy for broader audiences, they risk flattening the very attributes that make secondaries compelling. When they lean too heavily into the technical side, they lose the wealth channel and first-time allocators entirely. Neither outcome serves the category.
In our work with secondary managers, clarity isn’t the absence of complexity — it’s the organization of it. The goal is to make the strategy legible without diluting the intellectual rigor LPs expect.
Why Secondaries Feel Harder to Explain Than Other Private Markets Strategies
Most private market strategies begin with an intuitive idea: acquiring companies, lending capital, developing properties, delivering yield. Secondaries begin with something abstract — a market for existing fund positions — and require audiences to understand:
- the life cycle of a private equity fund,
- how NAVs are marked,
- why sellers transact,
- how pricing reflects future expectations, where visibility is higher.
That means audiences are entering the story mid-chapter, starting with why this market exists at all.
The Three-Layer Framework for Explaining a Complex Strategy
The most effective secondary firms use a narrative architecture that moves from concept → mechanics → application. This sequence anchors the reader before introducing nuance.
Here's the structure we often build:
When these layers are collapsed into one paragraph audiences walk away with partial comprehension and no conviction.
Layer 1: Establish the Concept Without Using Jargon as a Shortcut
At this stage, the audience doesn’t yet need to understand GP-leds, LP-leds, structured solutions, or price-to-NAV dynamics. They need to understand:
- the secondary market exists to transfer fund interests,
- buyers gain exposure to companies further along in their value-creation arcs,
- transactions typically occur at more mature stages of the investment lifecycle.
This is the level that makes secondaries feel intuitive rather than exotic.
An early conceptual table can often replace two pages of text:
This table is scaffolding the audience so later complexity has somewhere to land.
Layer 2: Clarify the Mechanics With Enough Detail to Build Trust
This is the portion that historically gets muddled. Some firms use too much jargon; others avoid it entirely. The goal is precision without overload.
The mechanics that matter most in secondary communication:
- How portfolio visibility informs underwriting
- How pricing reflects the maturity of underlying companies
- How diversification (vintage, sector, manager) shapes risk-adjusted return
- The difference between GP-led and LP-led transactions — at the highest level
- How cash flows behave (earlier yield, smoother return profile)
Layer 3: Show Application Where Clarity Becomes Differentiation
Once the audience understands what secondaries are and how they work, the final question becomes: why does this manager’s approach matter?
This is where specificity builds trust:
- What types of sellers are most relevant to your sourcing approach?
- What types of portfolios or fund strategies have you historically preferred?
- How do you think about concentration, pacing, and exposure limits?
- How consistent is your strategy across cycles?
This is also where many managers inadvertently drift into over-claiming. It’s better to be specific than sweeping.
A simple framework often helps anchor differentiation:
The discipline here is resisting the urge to say everything. Clarity is selective by definition.
Why Oversimplification Is the Greatest Risk in Secondaries Messaging
When a firm reduces the strategy to “J-curve mitigation and diversification,” they accidentally position themselves as interchangeable with the entire category and the category is expanding. Advisors are learning. Platforms are adding new structures. Individual investors are becoming a meaningful audience. LPs are applying sharper differentiation filters.
This is why structured complexity is the real advantage.
Closing Thought
The secondary market is dynamic; it should sound dynamic. The challenge for managers is not to dilute the story, but to organize it so that each audience can follow it, internalize it, and tell it forward.
A legible secondary story does three things:
- Shows the category is understandable
- Shows the strategy is repeatable
- Shows the manager is disciplined
A rebrand at an investment firm rarely belongs to one person. Founders, managing partners, investor relations, operations, and sometimes the leaders of affiliated strategies or a board all have a stake in how the firm presents itself. That breadth of input is valuable. It is also one of the main reasons brand projects slow down.
In our experience, multi-stakeholder rebrands seldom stall because of the creative work itself. They stall when it's unclear who is providing input at each stage, who makes the final call, and what exactly is being decided. Settling those questions at the outset is often the most important step in the whole project.
Why the Process Matters as Much as the Output
Some brand deliverables are naturally harder to align on than others. Names, logos, and messaging statements are abstract and highly subjective, and each one invites a personal reaction. The more people involved, the more opportunities there are for reasonable differences of opinion to compound.
A clear process doesn't remove those differences. It gives them a place to be heard and resolved, so the project can keep moving toward one coherent brand rather than an average of many preferences.
Define Who Decides Before Anything Is Designed
The first conversation in a multi-stakeholder project is usually about structure, not creative. A few questions help bring that structure into focus:
- Who is in the day-to-day working group, and who leads it?
- Which decisions belong to senior leadership alone?
- Who holds a firm veto, and who offers advisory input?
- When should affiliated managers, committees, or board members be brought in?
- At which milestones will leadership be asked to formally approve the work before it moves forward?
It helps to make those roles visible from the start, both to the agency and to everyone inside the firm. When each stakeholder knows what they'll be asked to weigh in on, and when, feedback tends to arrive clearer and earlier.
Listen Broadly, Decide Narrowly
Early in a project, wide participation is an asset. Before anything is proposed, the goal is to understand how different people describe the firm, what they value, and where their views diverge. Hearing from a broad group at this stage costs little, and it often surfaces tensions that would otherwise appear much later.
As the project moves toward decisions, the circle should narrow. Input from many people informs the work; approval from a defined few moves it forward. Keeping those two roles distinct is one of the simplest ways to protect both the timeline and the clarity of the final brand.
Consolidate Feedback Before It Reaches the Work
How feedback travels can matter as much as what it says. A few practices tend to keep review rounds productive:
The internal owner doesn't need to be the most senior person at the firm. What matters most is that they have the standing to gather input from leadership and the trust to speak for the group.
Make Subjective Decisions Easier to Make
Abstract deliverables invite open-ended debate. A few principles help a group reach decisions with confidence:
- React to something concrete. Most people find it easier to respond to proposed language or a specific option than to define an answer from scratch.
- Evaluate against agreed criteria. When positioning is settled first, creative work can be judged on whether it expresses that positioning, rather than on individual preference.
- Show the work in context. A positioning statement seen on a homepage or in a deck is easier to assess than the same words on a blank page.
- Favor a clear direction over a compromise. Blending distinct options can dilute the clarity that made each one compelling.
Sequence Decisions From Strategy to Execution
Brand decisions build on one another. Positioning informs the visual identity, and the visual identity informs how the website, materials, and channels come together. Approving each layer before moving to the next keeps the group aligned and avoids revisiting foundational questions once production is underway.
If new questions surface along the way, it's usually worth pausing to resolve them. A disagreement settled at the strategy stage is far easier to address than one that emerges once a website is in development.
What an Experienced Partner Adds
An agency that has worked through many rebrands brings more than creative capability. It knows which questions about decision rights to ask early, where projects with many stakeholders tend to get stuck, and how to adjust as new information arrives. As an outside party, it can also hear competing perspectives without a stake in any one of them, and help the group find language everyone can stand behind.
The most successful projects treat that structure as part of the engagement itself, agreed with leadership at the outset rather than worked out along the way.
Alignment Is the Deliverable Behind the Deliverables
The visible outputs of a rebrand are a name, a logo, a website, and a set of materials. The less visible output is a leadership team that agrees on what the firm stands for and can describe it consistently. A thoughtful process, with clear roles, broad listening, and decisions made in sequence, is what produces that agreement. When it is in place, the creative work has a firm foundation, and the brand that emerges reflects the whole organization rather than whoever spoke last.
Darien Group runs rebrands for investment managers with many stakeholders at the table. Learn more about our messaging and positioning and visual brand development work.