Invisible Brand

Can the concept of ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ in marketing communications stand up to rigorous interrogation?

From time to time, when we get bored of talking about football, we all need a bit of a philosophical discussion. Not too often, mind; we’re not French. But every now and then.

Over the last couple of years, though, we’ve all rather tended to ignore an opportunity
for a new, interesting and genuinely important discussion of this sort – the topic in question being “Can Effective Marketing Ever Treat Customers Really Fairly?”

I can’t remember reading anything much on the subject, or hearing any conference presentations about it: and although it might have come up once or twice towards the end of lunches or dinners with clients, contacts and prospects, I can’t honestly say it’s been on the agenda in new business pitches, client strategy meetings or product development committees.

Why is this? Is it because the question is too easy, the answers too obvious? I’d say it’s the opposite. Not just in financial services, but right across the whole universe of sales and marketing, the concept of ‘fairness’ is a very, very difficult
one to apply.

I’m not talking about blatant and obvious rip-offs. (For some reason that artful old offer
of “Beautifully engraved miniature portraits of Her Majesty the Queen for just £5” fulfilled by a 1p postage stamp comes to mind.) I’m wondering where, along the sliding scale of behaviour from outright villainy to Mother Theresa of Calcutta, we reach and cross the line between fairness and unfairness.

Saints or sinners?

Consider a few examples at random.

The way that supermarkets put displays of sweets at the checkouts to encourage shoppers – and most of all children – to pick something up while they’re waiting: fair or unfair? The way that greengrocers put the best strawberries on display on the stall, and then serve you not-quite-such-perfect specimens from behind the counter: fair or unfair? The way that the photographs on the packs of prepared foods show beautifully hand-made dishes, not the actual food that’s in the pack: fair or unfair? Talking of photographs, the way that the classic pouring shot in the Castrol GTX advertisements was actually Lyle’s Golden Syrup: fair or unfair? The way that car advertisers don’t have to say anything about the risks of their products, ranging from injury and death right through to unreliability or high depreciation: fair or unfair?

I could fill pages with this stuff, but I suspect you got the point some while back. I’m sorry if this comes as a shock, but sales and marketing are partisan and manipulative activities. Consumers are cynical, sceptical and increasingly easily disgruntled, and we have to be very careful not to overstep the mark or they will become angry with us. If we sell them rubbish products or mismanage their expectations too dramatically, we will lose their custom. But Mother Theresa, along with Mick MacAteer and Jeff Prestridge, would all probably say that the whole business of marketing and sales is riddled from top to bottom with little unfairnesses – minor deceptions, or exaggerations, or omissions, or distortions, designed to overcome objections, increase desire and make the sale.

(Incidentally, I know it’s a cheap shot but like a lot of people, I’d be much more willing to accept this kind of criticism from Mr MacAteer and the Consumers’ Association if they didn’t sell subscriptions to their own publication, Which?, by means of Prize Draw mailings too tatty and too dodgy for any other major marketer in the UK except Readers’ Digest.)

Safe havens
Anyway, when it comes to omissions, distortions, exaggerations and so forth, things are little different in financial services. It’s true that the FSA has created a few small, highly-regulated “safe havens” where marketers’ behaviour is tightly controlled – such as, for example, performance claims in investment advertising. But in this way it plays a role little more effective than small and under-resourced UN forces in war zones: pandemonium rages over 99% of the country, but provided that you remain within a few tiny enclaves things are calm and orderly.

It’s possible to criticise this state of affairs on two quite fundamental counts. For one thing, it can’t be good that war still rages over most of the country. (Far more people, for example, are ripped off by creditor and extended warranty insurance than by misleading performance claims on investment funds. And it’s surely a scandal that no-one understands how guaranteed equity bonds can only deliver their superficially-attractive returns by depriving investors of the income on their investments.)

But it’s also arguable that within the enclaves, vice versa, the constraints on behaviour are so restrictive that they create unfairness of a different sort. By insisting that customers are preposterously overburdened with incomprehensible information, and scared silly right from the outset by emphatic and alarming risk warnings, the regulator is making it effectively impossible for investment providers to undertake cost-effective marketing campaigns at all. It’s Catch-22: you can carry out a campaign only if it’s so offputting that it’s certain to be ineffective. This isn’t fair to providers, but if we think it’s a good thing for customers to have investments then it isn’t fair to them either.

Ethical dilemmas
Applying TCF to sales and marketing questions like these raises some complex and genuinely difficult ethical and practical dilemmas. But instead of debating and discussing them, the industry and the regulator seem to have tacitly agreed that the thing to do is to develop box-ticking processes that deal with the issues at a formal and technical level only.

This results, I suspect, from a tacit agreement that the alternative is simply too hard. For one thing, there are few great philosophers or ethicists in financial services (or financial regulation) today. And for another thing, even the most average philosopher or ethicist would realise pretty quickly,

I suspect, that the way the FSA currently wants to apply its TCF principles to product development, marketing and sales activities is just as untenably glib, superficial and unachievable as it would be in any other part of the commercial marketplace.