The mutual fund marketplace is shrinking, and investors are consolidating their mutual fund assets with fewer mutual fund firms and fewer distributors. Those are some of the conclusions Cogent Research is offering up in its 2012 Investor Brandscape report.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based consulting firm surveyed 4,000 affluent investors -- Americans with at least $100,000 in investable assets -- at the end of 2011. And among these affluent investors, non-ETF mutual funds seem to be losing market share. 71 percent of those investors owned mutual funds, down from 75 percent in 2010, and the total asset share of mutual funds dipped to 26 percent, from 33 percent in 2010.

"We continue to see fewer investors using mutual funds," John Meunier, a principal at Cogent, told MFWire.com. "The household penetration of mutual fund providers is down, for the most part."

Yet the affluent investors who do use mutual funds are more loyal, and more concentrated, in terms of the mutual fund families that they use. The average mutual fund investor in the survey only used 1.56 different mutual fund firms, down from 1.9 in 2010, and they used each fund firm across an average of 2.03 accounts, up from 1.98.

"There is greater loyalty to the mutual fund providers that investors are using today," Meunier said, noting that the report includes data relating to 34 top mutual fund firms. "There's an increase in those who say those companies are their primary provider."

Meunier and his colleagues also found that affluent investors seem to be consolidating their brokerage accounts, too, with the average number of client distributor relationships dropping 1.87 from 2.02 in 2010. Except one segment of the marketplace seemed to be opening more accounts, not fewer.

"The average number of distributor relationships was down across all groups, with the exception of $2 million and up," which went from 2.46 in 2010 to 3.21 in 2011, Meunier said. 

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