Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp thinks the pressure is on financial marketers to respond to today’s environmentally-responsible climate.

If it was a coincidence, it was a highly revealing one: within 24 hours of each other, Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer and Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco both put their names to major new carbon emission reduction schemes, Rose saying – with uncharacteristic fervour – that he had “signed his life away in blood” in terms of the strength of his firm’s commitment.

It was enough to make even an old cynic like me start thinking that maybe the level of anxiety about climate change is now so high that it’s going to bring about some real changes in behaviour – and, perhaps more important, that a growing number of consumers are going to start demanding real changes in behaviour from organisations they buy from or invest in. (Rose reported that calls from supportive private investors “flooded the lines to his office” after his announcement, although the old cynic in me thinks that he would say that, wouldn’t he.)

I must admit that I’m still not at all sure about all this. Judging where these stories are going at the moment when the media furore is at its height is impossibly difficult. It’s a bit like trying to estimate the severity of a forthcoming winter on summer’s hottest day. Too many past furores have faded away to be anything like sure this one will stick around. Remember bird flu? It was terrifying – an incurable illness that would carry us off in our millions, spread by birds which were flying unstoppably nearer and nearer and nearer to our defenceless islands. Then, after weeks of mounting horror, the worst happened. A swan carrying the illness was found dead somewhere in Britain – in Scotland, as I recall, not far from Dundee. Surely panic and pandemonium were just around the corner? Surely desperate mobs would soon start storming doctors’ surgeries, ignoring the morphine and opiates and carrying off all the vials they could find of the rather craply-named and allegedly ineffective treatment, Tamiflu?

None of this happened. In fact, the day after the Dundee swan was found, the story evaporated. I don’t know what happened. The bubble just burst. With the sole exception of a single outbreak, at one of Bernard Matthews’ not-so-bootiful animal concentration camps, from that day to this, none of us has read anything, done anything, said anything or even thought anything about the killer flu. It just headed off into Hype Heaven, where it joined all sorts of other stories that we’re still dimly aware of, but just don’t care about any more. Like the one about the oil running out. And new variant CJD. And mobile phone masts giving us cancer. And meteorites colliding with the earth.

But anyway. This one might be real. (Don’t get me wrong – I have no doubt that global warming is real. I’m just not convinced that anyone really wants to do anything much about it except use it as a pretext for any kind of related tax increase they can think of.)

And if it is real, then the financial services industry is going to have to do a lot of thinking about the implications. There is, to say the least, plenty of scope for behavioural change.

Some could be positive. I have never seen a consumer marketing campaign for any kind of carbon-neutral investment fund. If, as an investor, I wanted to concentrate on reducing climate change, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do it. If this whole thing is any more than
a nine days’ wonder, there must be an opportunity here.

Equally, there must be scope for building in some kind of carbon offset payments into a credit card, or maybe even a car loan. I know that purists scoff at carbon offset, but it’s better than nothing. I buy a lot of flight tickets with plastic. I’d much prefer a 2% tree-back than a 2% cash-back.

But let’s face it, most of the necessary changes of behaviour are to do with stopping things.
Some of the changes would be small but symbolic. Every time I come into London by night along the Westway, I’m irritated by the way that every light in the Pru’s building at Paddington is lit. I can even see the screensavers on all their computer screens.

But that, of course, is the tip of the iceberg. Look at the number of high street branches, and city head offices, lit up 24 hours a day like Christmas trees. (And then, of course, there are the Christmas trees. One of the little changes that’ll help me feel a bit surer that we’re serious about this whole thing will be when businesses and consumer together stop spending millions of pounds, billions of watts and supertankers full of fossil fuels on ghastly illuminated Santas and reindeers.)

Some changes would be really difficult. Junk mail is the most obvious. Don’t quote me on this, but I think the financial services industry currently sends out over 2 billion items of junk mail a year, almost all of which finish up in the bin (even the few that people respond to finish up in the bin). This is absolutely indefensible. Any organisation still contributing to this junk mountain isn’t serious about climate change.

Then there is the question of what organisations are doing to encourage positive behaviour on the part of their customers. This is the essence of Tesco’s strategy – helping consumers to waste less and make more responsible decisions. Is there a lender offering lower mortgage rates for energy-efficient houses? Or lower loan rates for hybrid cars? I’m not aware of one.

And more generally, is any financial institution talking seriously to its customers and investors about this issue, in the way that the likes of Marks & Spencer and Tesco now are? Of course everyone has some kind of social responsibility statement on their website – these have been obligatory for years – but we all know they’re just window-dressing. I have neither received, as a consumer, nor produced, as a communications professional, any piece of material for any financial services provider about any aspect of this issue.

That may, of course, be because people in the industry have decided that it’s all going to blow over. It’s just the new bird flu – in six months, or six weeks, no-one will care very much any more.

Maybe. But personally, I have a suspicion that like the gazillions of tons of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere, this issue is probably here to stay.