Invisible Brand

There's been little trace for many years, says Lucian Camp, but just recently we've started to see perfectly ordinary mass-market consumers turning up on the industry's boardroom radar screens.

No, sorry, I can't give any details. None at all, I'm afraid. NDA'd up to the eyeballs. But honestly, I'm not kidding, right now we have not one, not two but three clients who are further advanced than ever before with plans to start building some serious awareness among end consumers. Yes, that's right. Organisations which have only ever been interested in b2b markets of one sort or another are suddenly going b2ctastic.

True, they're moving at different speeds. One is still at least a year away, probably more. The other two, maybe six to nine months. A fourth – our longest-standing client, the wealth management firm St. James's Place – has already broken cover, embarking on a long-term journey towards significant awareness among its higher-net-worth target group late last spring.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I don't think so. I think we've reached a point where only the shyest and most retiring of product providers believes it's possible to stay unknown and stay successful.

There are lots of reasons – indeed, lots of different kinds of reasons – for this. In reverse order, here are some of them.

Fourth, to many people's immense relief (including mine), we seem to have finally got beyond this ridiculous nonsense that says you can't build a consumer brand without spending at least £10 million a year, probably £20 million a year, on TV advertising. None of our secret clients are going to spend £10 million a year, nor indeed are they going to use TV advertising (although programme sponsorship raises some interesting possibilities). The first year's tracking for St. James's Place shows some excellent progress for a spend of around £1.5 million. The £10 – £20 million stuff was always absurd, counterproductive guff put about by greedy admen trolling for big and quick wins. Thank goodness we seem to be over it.

Third, even though no-one knows where the current shake-up (or should that be shake-ups?) in the advice regime are headed, there's a general feeling that fairly shortly, it will become cost effective to distribute financial services among mass-market consumers again. If this is right, it will be a huge and hugely overdue development. For about 20 years, the cost of regulation has made it more or less impossible (and, even if possible, then incredibly unattractive) for most providers and advisers to make money in the mass market.

When the history is written, it will be seen as a bizarre and damaging period, in which the industry withdrew from the mass market just when the mass market, emerging from the era of employer- and state-funded long-term financial security, most needed the industry's help.

A generation too late, the government and the regulator seem likely to allow institutions to make money in the mass market again, almost certainly through the consequences of Generic Financial Advice and the coming of NPSS in 2012, and rather less certainly through the consequences of the Retail Distribution Review (well-informed people keep telling me that the current status of this initiative is best described by a phrase combining the words "long grass" and "kicked into," but maybe they're not as well-informed as they think they are). Anyway, we all know that mass-market consumers prefer brands that people have heard of (unlike HNW consumers, who'd be deeply upset to find that their suppliers were at all familiar among what for some reason we never call LNW consumers).

The second thing isn't as big a thing as I thought it was going to be. To some extent, bigger, smarter and more demanding distributors are increasingly asking providers what plans they have to build awareness among their customers. This is what I've been describing for years as the "Tesco effect," in reference to the way that in the grocery market it's pressure from big powerful retailers that drives most of the manufacturers' brand-building activities. In truth, it's a pressure that has been slow to build in financial services, mainly because the process of consolidation in the advice industry has, so far, been so deeply unimpressive. Consisting largely of weak and feeble small businesses clustering together like penguins blasted by Antarctic gales, the newly-consolidated advice businesses have generally been far too busy trying to develop remotely viable business models to worry about things like consumer awareness of product providers. But that's another article.

And then the most important thing is top secret and extremely controversial. The truth is that some big institutions showing a new interest in building consumer awareness have a very, very hidden agenda. What they're saying to themselves is that if:

a) the FSA isn't going to let them avoid accountability for their end customers by hiding behind IFAs for much longer,
and if

b) Internet technology is making it much cheaper and easier than ever before to manage customer relationships, then quite frankly all we need is a way to acquire customers and it'll become incredibly difficult to see the point of distributing through advisers rather than just doing it all ourselves.

The implications of this line of thought are so far-reaching that no-one is going to make an overt move for quite a while. But, again, building positive consumer awareness is part of the plan.

So, for all these reasons, consumers – especially mass-market consumers – are back on providers' radar like they haven't been for a long, long time. And as a result, in a variety of institutions, people without any experience of this sort of thing are grappling with all sorts of deeply unfamiliar problems – segmentation, behavioural finance, customer journeys, tracking studies, sponsorship regulations, advertising copy clearance procedures, the whole apparatus of consumer communications.

They're having a great time, and so of course are we on the agency side. But the Treasury giveth, and the Treasury taketh away. I just hope we haven't misread the direction they're pointething us towards just now.