Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp wonders with uncharacteristic optimism whether a new dawn of fair dealing, customer focus and “real” brands is slowly breaking on the UK’s High Streets

For all their self-proclaimed striving for distinctiveness and differentiation, the herd instinct among the UK's High Street financial institutions is pretty strong.

A generation or so ago, for example, the banks more or less simultaneously decided that it was time to move on from the world of rather formal, starchy, marble-pillared scariness that they had occupied for a century or more.

However, in more recent years, the herd’s chosen direction has proved somewhat problematic. To millions of consumers today, banks have become the utterly unacceptable face of capitalism, rapacious and bloated profiteers who will stop at nothing to raise extortionate charges from their customers while simultaneously stuffing inappropriate and dishonestly-presented products down their throats.

The current hoo-hah over potentially-illegal bank charges is just the latest and biggest in a series of scandals that must make traditional high street bankers weep with shame. The number of consumers who have downloaded the templated complaint forms from the internet seems to be a matter of some dispute – I have heard figures from 400,000 to 3 million quoted – but whatever the exact figure it’s a very large number, especially if you take the not unreasonable view that for everyone who’s done it, there are ten more who’ve thought about it.

Coming hard on the heels of a sequence of grim mis-selling and mis-treatment scandals, from mortgage endowments to precipice bonds and including legendary blunders like Barclays’ cack-handed announcement of 400 branch closures on the day they launched their ad campaign with the theme “a big world needs a big bank,” this latest furore makes you half-wonder if things have now passed the point of no return.

But you have to be an optimist to work in this business, and as an optimist I believe – well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I hope – a turning point may be at hand.

And being a really optimistic optimist, I believe or hope that agencies like this one may be able to play some part in the turnaround.

My point is to do with brands. For some years now, throughout this long period of relentless steep decline in customer perceptions, banks have been among the biggest customers of the big brand development agencies. And in every single one of those huge projects led by the Interbrands and Enterprises and Landors and Wolff Olinses, one cluster of messages has always come through more loudly than any other: that this brand project, unlike so many others, is not by any means just about the logo and the visual identity. This brand project, unlike so many others, is about the real behaviours and day-to-day actions of everyone who works here. This brand project, unlike so many others, will be built from the inside out. This brand project, unlike so many others, will be led from the top: we have the full commitment and support of the most senior management team. This brand project, unlike so many others, is about genuinely transforming the customer experience.

In your dreams. The fact is, the thing about this cluster of messages – despite the roadshow travelling round the country preaching the gospel to huge gatherings of staff at the NEC and at Excel, despite the brand-new intranet, despite the involvement of the HR Director in embedding the new values in the appraisal system, despite the mousemat and screensaver animating the new brand values on the desks of everyone who works there – the thing about this cluster of messages is that they were all very largely untrue.

At the very same moment that the CEO was onstage at the Wembley Arena preaching the gospel of Customer Focus to 11,000 staff, somewhere in an out-of-town office a product development committee was meeting. And when, as happened in my own quite recent experience, a leader of one such committee was asked if he thought the record-breakingly high charges on a proposed new product were a bit on the steep side, he memorably replied: “Yes, they are, but you do have to remember that this particular product is only for our existing customers.”

As an optimist, though, I believe that this era of Orwellian double-think is coming to an end. As a rather cynical optimist, my reason for believing this isn’t a particularly uplifting one: I think this overcharging thing has the potential to be so expensive that banks start to seriously consider the possibility that cheating and extortion may not be the best ways to manage their customer relationships.

And it’s this thought which opens up the possibility that maybe, just maybe, some banks might soon start undertaking some brand definition and development projects in a not-entirely-dishonest spirit – and that having identified core values like our old friends integrity and trust and customer focus, they might start trying to figure out what it would mean to try to live by them on a day-to-day basis.

It would be a long haul. The first hurdle would be high enough: persuading the bank’s staff that, this time we actually mean it, and that when we say we intend to treat our customers fairly, we haven’t included the usual invisible caveat “for as long as the FSA are looking in our direction.”

The second hurdle, persuading our customers that we mean it, would probably be even higher. Imagine if your bank mailed you with an offer “specially selected” for you, and you found that it actually was. Imagine if they offered you, say, some kind of insurance designed “for your peace of mind,” and you found that actually it was some rather good-value cover that increased your peace of mind rather than the usual legalised-theft purchase protection insurance. Imagine if you could get through to a branch – or, if that’s too much to imagine – a call centre without being reduced to tears of frustration before you get through to a human and ideally English-speaking voice.

I know, these things are hard to imagine. But now imagine the hardest thing of all: that five times running, or ten times running, or twenty times running, your bank resists the temptation to rip you off, or mess you about, or do something wrong, or just behave in a generally irritating fashion. And instead, it does what you want, with efficiency, grace and style.

In this situation, there could be only three possibilities. One, you’d died and gone to heaven. Two, without noticing, somehow – maybe while sleepwalking – you’d switched to First Direct. Or three, your high street bank had gone through another brand development exercise and actually decided to live by the consequences.

These explanations all sound pretty unlikely. But – as an optimist – given the intense darkness outside my window, and that extremely faint trace of what might just be the first glimpse of light over there towards the east, I think my money’s on the third one.