Invisible Brand

An important feature of Ellen MacArthur’s recent solo circumnavigation was weather routing – she was in touch, 24 hours a day, with one of the world’s most sophisticated weather mapping and forecasting organisations.

Their input enabled her to plot a course that maximised the chances of success and reduced risk as far as possible.

It seems that some kind of economic weather forecasting is becoming an increasingly necessary component of marketing strategy for the financial services industry. If global warming is making meteorological weather more dramatic and unstable, so political and financial globalisation are having more profound effects on financial marketing life here in the UK.

Currently, our forecasters are particularly concerned about a potentially huge storm cloud brewing on the west of the Atlantic – this has been designated the US Trade Deficit. Far to the East, on the other hand, they’re worried that the sun is shining unsustainably brightly and that high inflationary pressure is resulting. They call this China’s Burgeoning Growth. Another broiling of clouds, slightly nearer to home is dubbed Middle East Conflict. Nobody’s sure what will come out of that cloud formation, but few pronouncements are good.

Back home, of course, we have some local weather patterns of interest. The hugely damaging cyclone that has been predicted for some time – the House Price Crash – has fortunately not deepened so far and may present no more than the odd squally shower. Queuing up behind it in the Western Approaches is the low pressure system Nation in Debt. It’s already well down on the barometric scale and could lead, forecasters suggest, to a major reduction in economic activity.

A more reassuring area of high pressure seems finally to have settled over the Stock Market, with the FTSE at long last back above 5000 and looking confident. Given that 2004 was the first year of negative ISA sales, this is an encouraging start to 2005. In fact we can already see bluebirds, in the form of the advertising for aggressive growth funds, circling in the trade papers. This contrasts starkly with the storm petrels – heavily capital protected funds – that were in evidence a couple of years back.

But hold on a moment. Don’t we normally see those aggressive funds and big-number recent performance figures just before…

Well, we’ll see. But whether we need to factor in just a few passing clouds, or major turbulence ahead, there can be little doubt that economic weather will be a major consideration for financial marketers in the years ahead.

None of us wants to be remembered as the Michael Fish of our industry now, do we?