Aug. 9–After a hiatus, some important data resurfaced in new ads for Fidelity Investments’ stock mutual funds: actual investment returns.

With the second-quarter surge in the stock market that pushed the Dow Jones industrial average above 9,000 and investors rediscovering the joys of opening their mutual fund statements, mutual fund companies are trying to persuade people it’s safe to begin pouring money back into their stock funds. They’re bragging about fund performance in ads again, opening new funds keyed to the recent federal tax cut or promoting existing funds that gradually transition investors back into stocks.

One of the most popular marketing efforts right now tries not to look like obvious salesmanship: educational campaigns to get investors to relearn investing basics, such as asset diversification. The soft sell is designed to ease addled investors back into stocks, and put them on track for their long-term goals. Not incidentally, if this kind of campaign works, it increases the likelihood of locking investors in as longtime customers, who are more profitable to fund companies.

Whether in ads to the public, or in marketing campaigns to investment advisers who work with clients, the tone is similar, said Chip Roame, managing principal of Tiburon Strategic Advisors, a consulting firm for the financial services sector: “Hey, you’ve got to get your clients back in.”

With the market rally just weeks old, there isn’t a flood of new pitches hitting investors and their investment advisers just yet. Indeed, spending by investment companies on ads targeting consumers fell to $162 million in the second quarter from $251 million a year earlier.

But industry officials said they are gearing up. “Our phone is ringing off the hook,” said Arnold Wechsler, chief executive of Wechsler Ross & Partners, a New York firm that develops marketing materials for financial services companies. “Six months ago, nine months ago, it wasn’t ringing at all.”

In separate bids to expand awareness of their stock funds, Boston’s Evergreen Investments began running new television ads in late April, and Janus Capital Group plans to be on TV in the fourth quarter. Officials at each firm said it is a coincidence the ad campaigns come as the stock market rebounded.

Denver-based Janus drew considerable attention when its growth and tech funds invested so deeply in the new economy math that they soared during the bull market and exploded during the bear. Now it is running print ads promoting a new fund that uses sophisticated math to produce superior returns with lower risk. “The new math at Janus,” the ad caption reads.

“Yeah, the old math was subtraction, wasn’t it?” said Russ Kinnel, director of funds research at mutual fund watcher Morningstar, who said Janus’s image still suffers from when its funds “got clobbered.”

A Janus spokeswoman, Shelley Peterson, said the ad is one of many efforts to let investors know that a newly revamped Janus owns other mutual funds under different names that have their own successful investment strategies. “We definitely went through a three-year period in the market where performance wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” she said. “We’ve begun to turn that performance around, and we’re completely confident we’ll be able to do so.”

T. Rowe Price has been running ads that talk about the company’s “independent” in-house research staff, in a pointed jab at Wall Street firms that earlier this year settled charges that their research staff hyped stocks to win investment banking business. Unlike many Wall Street firms, Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price’s sole business is investing money for clients. So, as the ad implies, the company doesn’t have the risk of being compromised by potential conflicts of interest from an investment banking business.

Fidelity, meanwhile, used investment performance data in ads for its fixed-income funds when the bond market was surging over the last year.

In various ads for its stock funds, however, Fidelity generally didn’t include the funds’ actual returns, but instead just listed how many stars each fund earned in Morningstar’s popular ranking system. The Morningstar system rates individual funds against their peers on a variety of investment measurements, such as relative performance and expenses, and gives the best ones five stars.

But in June, Fidelity began to more broadly include recent performance in ads for stock funds, which looked pretty good after the market’s rally. One ad running now notes how Fidelity Contrafund, for example, returned 10.54 percent from January through mid-June.

The ads with just the star rankings “might have gotten one’s attention, but they weren’t a call to action” to get investors to put money into the funds, said Geoffrey Bobroff, an industry consultant in East Greenwich, R.I. The performance “numbers are really a call to action.”

Fidelity spokeswoman Anne Crowley said the company chose to use just the star-rating system in stock fund ads more than a year ago not because the return numbers looked bad but because customers found it more helpful in evaluating funds at a time when most had negative returns.

Given that so many investors had stopped looking at their statements during the down market, Crowley said, Fidelity decided to resume including the performance data because “some people may be unaware that the markets were starting to improve.”

Companies are also trying to capitalize on renewed interest in stocks by launching funds that reflect investors’ more conservative mood. The new offerings emphasize long-term diversification, or favor value-style investing over growth stocks by, for example, investing in companies that pay dividends. Fidelity has launched 10 funds so far this year, including three new value-oriented funds, compared to 13 all last year. And in June it eliminated the 3 percent sales charge on its flagship Magellan fund and four others to make it cheaper for investors to put money into them.

Eaton Vance Corp. and Charles Schwab Corp. last week each launched funds that invest in dividend-paying stocks. Bill Gillen, Eaton Vance’s national sales director, said the new fund was inspired by the recent federal tax cut on corporate dividends. But, he added, “certainly the fact that the market has recovered has helped people regain confidence in the equity market, which contributes to the receptivity of the audience.”

Fund companies also said they are trying to anticipate two very different types of moods among investors: a reluctance to jump back in because memories of the bear market are still too vivid; and, at the other extreme, eagerness to get in on the kinds of boffo returns produced by the recent rally.

Evergreen, which sells its funds through investment advisers, is putting its sales force behind three funds, each of which offers an increasingly higher level of exposure to equities as a way to let wary investors gradually ease back into stocks. “Clients aren’t automatically going to be bouncing right into aggressive growth the way they were in 1999. There’s more client appetite for products with lower-risk profiles,” said Howard Present, Evergreen’s director of global product management.

On the other hand, Jim Tambone, copresident of distribution for Columbia Management Group, the investment arm of FleetBoston Financial Corp., said, “The challenge is not so much ‘How do we sell more in this environment?’, it’s how you temper that down” so investors don’t get in the trap of having too much money in one sector of the market, such as growth-oriented funds.

Columbia, Evergreen, and other mutual fund companies said they are spending more time and money holding seminars with investment advisers and developing customized portfolios to come up with strategies that match clients’ long-term needs with their lineup of funds.

This so-called educational approach serves several purposes for fund firms. For one, it gets them away from looking like they’re just out to flog returns. Bobroff, the consultant, said it “lessens the fear that you’re arguably flaunting or actively promoting your good numbers,” which may come back to haunt mutual fund companies if the market tanks and those funds perform poorly again.

Also, fund companies want happy customers who stay around. That means helping them make enough money to reach their retirement goals. It also means helping minimize losses when stock markets inevitably hit other down periods. “The way we want to approach the marketplace, we want to make people really understand our products and use them correctly,” said Jim FitzGerald, president of the fund distribution arm of MFS Investment Management in Boston. “If they do, they’re going to have a better experience at MFS.”

This is not just altruism at work. Fund companies lose money on customers who jump from fund to fund, or firm to firm, just to chase the fund that posts strong performance in any one quarter, or, conversely, who pull out altogether after a year or two because the market isn’t delivering.

The fund industry isn’t expected to grow as fast as it did in the ’90s. So, Bobroff said, “If we can extend the client relationship for one to three years more, then we as a management group can make more money off that relationship.”

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