Invisible Brand

They'll tell you everything you need to know, assets Lucian Camp, about creating a distinctive and sucessful world for your brand.

St Paul was on the road to Damascus. Archimedes was in the bath. My life-changing flash of insight and understanding happened while I was watching George Cole and Dennis Waterman in Minder.

My starting-point was a deceptively simple observation. George is married (to the unforgettablybranded 'her indoors') but you never see his wife. What's more, I realised, you never will. Because - this is the key point - the writers of the programmes have created a set of ground rules which they will never break, and one of those rules is that you don't see 'her indoors'.

To put the same point in grander terms, what the writers have done is to create a world in which certain things can (and indeed in some cases must) happen, like George Cole being cowardly and nervous, and other things absolutely cannot happen, like seeing 'her indoors'. And anyone who is tackling any kind of creative writing that has to be sustained over a period of time - like a sitcom, or a novel, or even a long-running advertising campaign - has the same obligation: their first and arguably most important task is to create the ground rules of the world which their characters are going to occupy. This is a great pleasure and a great privilege. It makes the creative writer feel just a little bit like God. And it's a lot of fun.

I don't suggest that there was anything original or surprising about my insight. Two years into my copywriting career it was news to me, but millions of creative writers were miles ahead of me. If you're writing a Tom & Jerry script, no-one can get seriously or lastingly hurt. If it's Dad's Army, sooner or later Captain Mainwaring has to say 'Stupid boy'. When Dick Francis plans out his next novel, his hero has to be a goodlooking and attractive figure connected to the horseracing industry and suffering from a minor physical or psychological disability. In my agency's series of commercials for MORE TH>N, Lucky the dog had not only to be present, but also to play a role we defined as 'agent of misfortune' - bringing about the near-disaster that would create the need for insurance.

I think it must have been as long ago as 1979 when I first understood the world-creating thing. But as a copywriter writing mainly TV commercials, for several years afterwards I thought that the whole business only applied to writing. It was only gradually - as I became more involved in the world of financial services and, in particular, in the whole business of defining and managing the customer experience in a differentiated and brand-minded way - that I realised that building brands involves exactly the same kind of world-creation process. The only significant difference is that in a service industry, the world isn't merely one that the consumer observes on the screen or the printed page: it's one that he or she actively engages with.

Elsewhere in the service economy, that level of involvement often results in a rich, involving and satisfying brand experience. Organisations from Claridge's Hotel to Body Shop to South West Airlines invite their customers into their own recognisable, consistent and distinctive worlds. But in financial services, there's only a handful of clear-cut examples. First Direct stands out in the middle market; Coutts, St. James's Place and one or two others in wealth management. But who can really say how the worlds created by any of the major players in banking, cards or insurance differ from any of the others?

There is a reason for this, and the reason is the point of this article. To create a really distinctive and involving world, you have to make some personal and idiosyncratic choices. There's no compelling or objective reason why Arthur Daley's wife has to be an invisible presence in Minder: it's just a choice that the writers made. Anita Roddick chose - although for more philosophical reasons - not to test her toiletries on animals. Coutts choose to pay blokes to stand outside their flagship branches wearing red frock coats. These individual choices make the difference.

Oddly enough - and I think this is a point which has been insufficiently considered and understood - idiosyncratic choices about the way organisations do things can still be important and positively differentiating even if customers don't like them much.

IKEA is a good example of a service business that makes all sorts of idiosyncratic choices. No-one else in this country gives sofas and saucepans names like Frot and Bugga. No other furniture store sells Swedish meatballs by the million. And no other furniture store makes it more or less compulsory to walk through a mile of roomsets when all you want to buy is a salad bowl, or makes it more or less impossible to take your laden trolley to your car. (Oddly enough, you have to take your car to your trolley.) Some of these choices are quite endearing. Others are irritating. But hey, that's IKEA. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.

Other retailers are more idiosyncratic still. I have it in mind that the fast food restaurant chain Nando's is a bit more palatable than most. But I'm not sure, because the Nando's ordering system is so odd and so intimidating that I don't actually dare to go there. In fact, there are quite a few retailers with intimidatingly odd systems: Argos, Subway, Yo! Sushi and most betting shops all give the inexperienced customer an alarming 'I don't know how to do this' feeling.

I suppose the corollary is also true, and also important: these same businesses give the experienced customer a gratifying 'I do know how to do this' feeling. When you know how to buy something at Argos, it's probably quite funny watching people like me staggering about from wrong queue to wrong queue.

But I can hardly think of an idiosyncratic experience to be had anywhere in mainstream financial services. Barclays are excited about the fact that they've started giving away free pens in their branches, but it's not very idiosyncratic, really, is it? IKEA have been giving away free pencils for a decade or more, and frankly the fact didn't jump out at me as a point worth making three paragraphs ago.

And beyond that, it's a real struggle to think of anything at all. The fact is, the financial services industry may talk a lot about the principle of differentiation, but it's terrified of the practice of it. How do the worlds created by any mainstream direct insurer differ from any other? There may be a small number of genuinely big ideas - MORE TH>N always told us that they were the only insurer to guarantee customers' no claims bonus for life - but often these mean little to consumers and are assumed to be parity propositions which everyone else offers anyway. It's the idiosyncratic small ideas - the Swedish meatballs - that make the difference: who arranges a relaxing massage after you've had an accident? Or provides a limo to take you to and from your authorised repairer?

The fact is, there are no meaningful, enjoyable and memorable differences between the worlds the big institutions are creating, and that, more than anything else, is the reason why customers can find nothing to choose between them.

There is huge and sustainable competitive advantage to be had by recognising the opportunity that exists in this area. And anyone could start, any time they wanted to.