Invisible Brand

Or are we? Lucian Camp takes issue with the widespread assumption that financial services marketers are uniquely hard done by.

We Spurs fans are a miserable lot. I’m writing this, as it happens, two days after we lost by a hotly-disputed penalty to Manchester United. Hotly disputed by Manchester United fans, that is, who, to a man (or woman, or boy, or girl) thought we were hard done by. Spurs fans greeted the injustice with their normal bleak bitterness, just another crumb of evidence that God supports Arsenal.

But just for once this isn’t a piece about football; it’s a piece about people in financial services marketing. And I must say that, while only a brave and masochistic handful of them, to my knowledge, support Tottenham, a great many would feel totally at home in the negative, cynical, self-critical environment of the Upper East Stand at White Hart Lane.

The point is, just like Spurs fans, people in financial services marketing are awfully good at feeling hard done by. We’re always ready to feel done down, picked on, unfairly treated, boxed up like the proverbial kipper. And in particular, we have a strange tendency to believe that no-one else in any other part of the consumer economy experiences anything like the same terrible problems that we do.

Take a look around

In truth, though, most of our problems are very familiar to people in all sorts of other businesses. Let’s think about a few examples.

A particularly common cluster of grumbles in the FS marketing community is that we’re dealing with a category that suffers from very low consumer interest, where purchases are infrequent and are usually distress purchases. Actually, there are lots of categories like this. Very few people respond with wild cries of enthusiasm to the need to buy new washing machines, or to have their roofs repaired. A large segment of people – briefly, if a little simplistically defined as ‘men’ – have much the same attitude towards the buying of clothes. To my personal bewilderment, another large segment – shorthanded reasonably accurately as ‘women’ – feel more or less this way about cars. And right across about 98.5% of the market, pretty much everyone feels this way about car tyres. Believe me, you haven’t seen a low interest/infrequent-and-distress purchase market until you’ve worked on a car tyre account. I have. I worked on Dunlop years ago, and the only interesting thing was the fact that Murray Walker – yes, that Murray Walker – was the account director.

What makes a fridge cold?

The adjacent grumble-cluster to this one is probably the idea that as a result of their low interest, consumers have low understanding of financial services and it’s impossibly difficult to communicate the true benefits of what we have to offer to them. The reality, of course, is that consumers have pitifully low understanding of just about everything. Do you know how a DVD player works? Or a diesel engine? What makes a fridge cold? Or a microwave hot? Why does fluoride make teeth stronger? Do you use hops in making lager? How does instant coffee become so easy to dissolve? Are there any naturally fizzy mineral waters? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, and do you know what? I don’t care.

Trust me, I’m in financial services

Alongside low understanding sits probably our biggest cause of special pleading, the dreaded lack of trust. Some people say we deserve it and have only ourselves to blame; some people say it’s Jeff Prestridge’s fault. But everyone says it’s a uniquely terrible burden that we struggle under. Amidst this deafening chorus of complaint, the financial services industry doesn’t seem to have heard that loss of trust has been a bit of a macro issue across the whole of society for at least 50 years now. (Actually, if you want to pin the turning-point down to a single date, I’d be inclined to choose July 1st 1916, the first day of the first battle of the Somme.)

Even the briefest search of the memory banks reveals a cross-section of recent ‘crises of trust’ that includes Tony Blair, British beef, the police, Sunny Delight, most members of the royal family but especially Prince Charles, football agents, all politicians (always), estate agents, post-Enron accountants, the United Nations, the oil companies, the Roman Catholic church, makers of cars that topple over, the French, A Levels, the pharmaceutical industry, the fast food industry, the European Community, the media and rogue Blue Peter presenters. Trust, we can safely say, is not exactly in at the moment. Indeed, trust is out. The financial services industry is a bit-part player in a long-running global trust drama, not a victim of some special and terrible fate.

Well, FS marketers often grumble about how easily their best ideas can be copied. I don’t know about you, but I tend to react to this with what I think is usually described as a ‘snort of derision.

Heavy, man

Then, of course, there is the oppressive weight of regulation. I suspect it’s very probably true that as a whole, financial services companies are more broadly regulated than any others, but as far as marketing and communication is concerned, I can’t help thinking we escape pretty lightly. The drug companies, for example, aren’t allowed to promote the large majority of their products to consumers at all, and they have to pre-submit all advertising copy for the few that they can. All promotion of cigarettes has now been stubbed out. All sorts of advertising, including anything for alcoholic drinks and anything aimed at children, is subject to heavy regulation and the arbitrary imposition of strange and ambiguous rules. Oddly enough, there’s at least one other market which shares our problems with the advertising of performance – in the car market, you’re not allowed to make performance the ‘main focus’ of advertising, for fear that it would encourage speed-crazed and dangerous driving.

Imitation is the sincerest form…

What else? Well, FS marketers often grumble about how easily their best ideas can be copied. I don’t know about you, but I tend to react to this with what I think is usually described as a ‘snort of derision.’ While snorting, three thoughts pass through my mind. First, I think ‘Just remind me of that huge long list of brilliant innovative FS ideas we’re talking about here.’ Second, I think ‘Hang on a minute, hasn’t it generally tended to be the cons, scams and rip-offs that everyone copies?’ But third, once again, I can’t help thinking that this problem – insofar as it exists – is pretty plainly lacking in uniqueness. There are a couple of markets where lengthy R&D cycles, tough regulation and the ability to protect intellectual property with patents give innovators some advantages; by chance two that I’ve mentioned in this article, pharmaceuticals and automotive, come to mind. Otherwise – in fmcg, retailing, leisure and travel, consumer electronics, fashion, durables, you name it – the day after you’ve launched your product or service they’ve got a sample on a workbench in Malaysia or China or somewhere, disassembled it and figured out how to build something very, very similar for less than half the price.

The trouble with people…

And finally, many marketing people in financial services complain about the fact that they are promoting products and services which are people-based and so prone to inconsistency. Same story. This is true, but it’s not the problem that’s unique; it’s the hopelessness of most of the industry’s response to it. All people-based businesses are prone to inconsistency, and, as a result, engineering consistency into them is the all-important, over-arching, central management challenge. We Brits aren’t as good as Americans at this, but we’re pretty good: that’s one reason why we have many great retail brands, like Tesco, Pret A Manger or Body Shop. In financial services there are some notable successes among businesses that are young, and/or small, and/or single-site, and/or simple – and preferably all four – but it’s still impossible to think of a big, decentralised, complicated, long-standing financial services business that has engineered anything consistently distinctive (or distinctively consistent) into its people’s behaviour. This reflects a distressing management failure on the part of the financial services industry rather than an unfairness inflicted upon us.

The pleasures of a good whinge

And that, I think, is probably the overall theme of this article. OK, to be fair, it’s probably true that the combination of problems that afflict us makes life pretty tricky. But none of the problems is anything like unique, and there’s plenty of evidence, both in financial services and beyond, that all of them can be successfully resolved. As a life-long Spurs fan, I understand the pleasures of a good whinge better than most. But when push comes to shove, even Spurs fans would rather be celebrating victories than whingeing about defeats.