Invisible Brand

The plan was to integrate online, telephone and face-to-face advice so that customers could hop happily like mountain goats from channel to channel.

What? Sorry? The piece about digital?
Don’t worry, I’ve nearly finished it. Well, I’ve nearly started it. But it’s not my fault. Not really. You see, I’d just opened this file to start writing when I saw an email alert about a new campaign from one of our client’s key competitors. So obviously I had to click through to read the full story. And then when I did, there was a rather groovy new eye-blaster from another company that’s one of our hottest prospects.

So I clicked through to their microsite, and there was some new streaming video featuring one of their fund managers. And he was saying some gloomy things about the market, so I thought I should check on the prices of a couple of investments of my own. So I went into Yahoo Finance via my Favourites, and called up some charts and graphs.

And then I Google searched on ‘Japan stock market outlook 2007.’ And I was just reading some interesting stuff from a big US asset manager’s Tokyo research team when you emailed me and asked where’s the piece about digital.

Yes, now you mention it, I suppose this is what used to be called ‘surfing the net,’ although I must say it’s a long time since I heard that expression. Today, it’s what’s called ‘part of life.’

I can remember – so can you, it’s only about five or six years ago – when the internet was still in a box marked ‘The Internet.’ It won’t be long, techies used to tell us, before it’s just a normal part of everyday life, a bit like the fridge or the immersion heater. Asking people whether they used it would be like asking them if they used the electric light or the telephone.

And apart from sex and gambling, they said, the industry that had the most to gain was financial services. In both b2b and b2c, the internet would become the main focus of people’s financial lives. It would be where they would manage their money and carry out their transactions. It would be where they would do their financial homework. And it would be where they would be most receptive to financial marketing propositions and communications.

Five or six years on, all the evidence is that unlike most forecasts, these forecasts were almost completely correct.

OK, in some areas progress has been a bit slower than predicted. Among other things, the take-up rate of broadband is one of the two most important drivers, and where there are still pockets of resistance from die-hard dial-up traditionalists behaviour is slower to change. (The other crucial driver is the perceived hassle-to-benefit equation: surprise, surprise, in the early days of major hassle and little or no benefit, progress was slow, but in markets like insurance, where there’s little hassle and big benefits, like online discounts of 15% or more, online has now become the dominant distribution channel.)

Some products are less online-friendly than others: mortgages, in particular, are only starting to move from the researching phase into the transacting phase. And some b2b markets, especially the IFA community, seem more attached to their paper processes and their Mont Blanc pens than originally anticipated.

Still, taken as a whole, the month in which online became a bigger advertising medium than Channel 4 is probably as good a month as any to decide that as a sales and marketing channel, the internet has now come of age. The techies were right: the pendulum has swung: the centre of gravity of the financial services industry is now located on screens like the one I’m staring at just now.

Except.

Except that those forecasts missed just one small point. Well, actually, not so small. Actually, very big.

The point they missed is that while digital’s been coming, nothing has been going. In the same way that photography didn’t replace painting, and film didn’t replace theatre, and the Moog Synthesiser didn’t replace the Bechstein concert grand, the internet isn’t replacing anything.

On the contrary. It’s creating a whole lot of new demands and challenges in responding to consumers’ natural expectation that it’ll be seamlessly integrated with everything else. It’s five years ago now since we won a very exciting big new leading-edge financial advice account, where the plan was to integrate online, telephone and face-to-face advice so that customers could hop happily like mountain goats from channel to channel. The launch plans were postponed indefinitely when the full horror of the technological challenge became clear, and to the best of my knowledge five years later no such integrated advice proposition exists.

Exactly the same issue – integration in a both/and, not either/or, world – exists in digital marketing. Online and offline communication combine more powerfully than many of us had ever imagined. It’s really quite startling how pay-per-click numbers improve while a print or outdoor campaign is running. And the reverse is also true: call centres certainly notice the difference in call volumes when big online campaigns kick off.

Where am I going with all this? I seem to be saying a lot about integration, and to be making the point – in various different ways – that the more the internet can be integrated, as both a sales and a marketing channel, with its offline counterparts, the better the consumer experience and the better the overall results.

A logical conclusion would be that it’s better for financial services providers thinking in this way to work with integrated agencies which also think in this way, rather than with compartmentalised specialists who are either unwilling or unable to make the necessary connections outside their own virtual silos.

Trouble is, Invisible Brand takes a hardline stance on not becoming a mouthpiece for cchm:ping sales pitches. So instead, I’ll have to end like this.