Invisible Brand

Investment funds advertisers, according to Lucian Camp, should start thinking like pizza manufacturers or car makers.

Tricks of the creative trade, No.1: if you want a fresh and different advertising idea for a product in one category, try treating it as if it was in a completely different category.

Of course this isn’t an approach to be taken literally. In treating a pizza, say, as if it was a washing powder, you don’t actually have to ram slices of it into your washing machine. Treating a car like a lager doesn’t mean parking it at the bar. It’s not the detail of the action that counts: it’s the creative conventions that apply.

Yes, OK, you need a few examples of this principle in action. Treat a family hatchback like jeans: Renault Megane and “shake that ass”. Treat catfood like Tesco Finest ready meals: whatever that luxury catfood is called with that very weird white cat with the bright green eyes. Treat a chocolate bar like a sex aid: Cadbury’s Flake.

Over the years, this way of thinking has become a little bit more difficult, simply because the category rules that apply have gradually become looser and less restrictive. In fact, we’ve probably reached a point today where category rules exist more in viewers’ minds than they do in the reality of the commercials they’re watching. These days, there aren’t many washing powder commercials in which housewives are asked to swap one packet of Brand X for two of Brand Y. There aren’t many confectionery commercials in which you see a brown viscous liquid “enrobing” (great word) a pair of shortbread biscuits. And there aren’t many car commercials in which a few seconds of mechanical storytelling sets up a sequence of 25 seconds or so in which the car speeds through glorious scenery. Actually, come to think of it, there still are quite a few car commercials like that.

But anyway, if there’s one category that’s still more trapped in category rules than any other, and which could benefit more obviously from some rule-importation from other categories, it’s got to be investment funds.

I know I’ve said this before, and I expect I’ll say it again: investment funds advertising reminds me of Dorothy Parker’s famous verdict on the acting abilities of Katharine Hepburn, that “she runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

In truth, there aren’t many investment advertisers who even make it as far as B. The majority remain clustered densely around A.

What is A in investment funds advertising? It’s performance, and how the advertiser in question goes about getting it.

You have to look fairly closely at the advertisements to appreciate this fully. Superficially, many of the campaigns look different from each other. BlackRock Merrill Lynch’s bull-and-man silhouettes don’t look much like Fidelity’s multiple choice questions, which don’t look much like Artemis’s retro hunting scenes, which don’t look much like Invesco’s monochrome mountain, which doesn’t look much like F&C’s F&CTs, which don’t look much like New Star’s lairy planet, and so on. But either literally, or metaphorically, or iconically, or implicitly, or whatever, every one of these campaigns is about the achievement of excellent performance, and how the advertiser goes about it.

The fact that the FSA introduced rules a year or so ago forbidding investment advertisers from making performance – or to be exact past performance – the “main message” of their ads has made relatively little difference. For one thing, the new rules don’t apply to trade press advertising, where the majority of this material appears. And for another thing, advertisers and their agencies haven’t found it too hard to circumvent the rules. You can’t run a headline these days saying “UP 93% over the last twelve months.” But you probably can run a headline saying “With our investment process, you could be UP 93% over the next twelve months.” Or indeed “UP 93% in twelve months would be a disappointing outcome for us at Acme Investments.” And so on.

Of course there are good and obvious reasons why investment funds advertisers don’t want to stray too far away from performance, and the reasons why they think they can deliver it. It’s particularly hard to resist for the many advertisers who are either targeting financial advisers exclusively, or looking for a double-duty approach that appeals both to advisers and to hobbyist private investors. I’m certainly not suggesting that it’s wrong to focus on performance and how each firm aims to achieve it.

But what must be wrong is the way that at the moment, every single major advertiser in this overcrowded and largely undifferentiated market focuses on the same thing – while enormous expanses of differentiated territory, especially those where it’s possible to make emotional rather than rational connections, remain almost entirely unoccupied.

In truth, the category rules in investment funds are so strong and so rarely broken that it’s quite difficult to imagine what breaking them would actually look like. One good (and rare) example is our own work for the children’s savings scheme based on the Witan Investment Trust, Jump. This campaign is so different, so refreshing, so utterly unwilling to conform to the category rules that it makes me hug myself with pleasure every time I see it. It’s great advertising in itself. But it’s also a great and inspiring example of what you can do when you break the category rules. (Actually, the style of the advertising owes far more to family-oriented grocery products, like Bisto and Oxo, than it does to investments.)

Inspired by this example, let’s think of some others. Legal & General, promoting only low-cost tracker funds to the direct market, are the best placed to adopt a price-driven value-for-money proposition. What if they imported the category rules of the low-cost airlines, easyJet and Ryanair? M&G stands closest to a Virgin-like “people’s champion” positioning. Why not borrow a few tricks from Beardie’s advertising guard-books? F&C, with its Stewardship range, still has the strongest hand to play in ethical investing: how about applying some of the category rules that built the Body Shop business? And Fidelity, as a US-based world leader, might do worse than learn from IBM’s “solutions for a small planet” work.

I know, I know: almost all of these ideas, and almost all the dozens of others you could come up with just as easily, all require something that no investment funds advertiser has yet committed to, namely a significant and sustained commitment to consumer-facing advertising and brand-building. None of this is going to work alongside all the performance-obsessed players in the pages of Investment Week. And for some inexplicable reason, investment funds providers, having decided very sensibly that they have little interest in selling direct to consumers, simultaneously decided much less sensibly that they have no interest in building positive awareness among consumers either. This was always a complete non-sequitur: very few manufacturers sell direct to the consumer, but most still recognise the value of a consumer brand. But for the time being, there is no investment funds advertiser except arguably New Star who is genuinely interested in reaching the consumer.

Oh well. It sounds like it may be a while before the opportunity exists to import other categories’ rules into the investment space. So maybe we need to turn the argument on its head. How about we treat a car, or a lager, or a confectionery brand, as if it was an investment fund?