Invisible Brand

As an agency that collectively spends something like 3,000 person-hours a week producing financial marketing communications, we could get pretty depressed when we hear the sort of words that people use to describe them.

But hang on a minute. Before we wallow in our usual misery about the general lack of enthusiasm for the kind of stuff that we do, let’s see if we can find anything to cheer us up.

Look, what’s this? Seems to be the results from a brand-new quantitative market research study. Apparently a nationally-representative sample of consumers has been asked to agree or disagree with a bunch of attitude statements that have been put in front of them. What, we ask ourselves eagerly, are these statements? And did the consumers agree with them or not?

This first statement is a bit of a shocker. “Money is a very emotive subject which often causes arguments, stresses and strains” it says. You’re kidding. Surely you mean that it’s a deeply boring subject which causes snores and yawns? Not at all. As many as 75% of consumers agree with that statement, just about exactly 50% agreeing strongly. And oddly enough, young people – who we always imagine are extra-specially uninterested in financial matters – are the most likely to agree: 82% of 18-to-24s do, in fact.

OK, fine, but surely this is just an abstract generalisation. Do these people really take financial matters seriously at a personal level? Well, the second statement in the research – commissioned by cchm:ping in October – says “I take my own finances seriously and think about them a good deal.” Want to take a guess at the level of agreement? In fact, it’s a shade higher than the last one – 77% across the population as a whole, and, again, a bit higher than that among the younger groups (81% among the 25-to-34s, for example).

So it’s important. But how important? We asked people to react to this statement: “Along with your health and your personal relationships, your financial situation is one of the most important parts of your life.” That would make it pretty important, wouldn’t it? Right up there with your health and your love life?

Well, 70% of the population agree with the statement, and only 7% strongly disagree. If we’d been carrying out research in consumer goods categories, like haircare products or cooking fats, do you think we’d have seen similar scores?

And finally, we should remember the possibility that people might take these financial matters extremely seriously at a theoretical level, but still have no real interest in finding out more on the subject. Are they actually willing to listen to ideas that can help them? Well, once again it looks as if the answer is yes. Just about exactly half agree with the statement “I wish I was better at managing my money”. And as you might expect, the level of agreement is higher among the younger groups – up to 66% of the 18-to-35s.

In truth, none of this should come as any real surprise. If we take a step back and think about it for a minute, those of us responsible for financial communications know perfectly well that we are dealing with just about the most emotive, powerful, sensitive and even potentially dangerous substance on earth. People kill for money. They think about it, dream about it, fantasise about it, do anything for it. Their hopes and fears for themselves and the people they love most are inextricably connected with it.

Money doesn’t bore them. Anything but. It’s the stuff that clients and agencies produce that renders them comatose.

In the second part of our research, we asked respondents whether they agreed with some attitude statements about financial marketing communications – which we defined as “advertisements, brochures, mail-shots and websites from organisations like banks, credit card companies, investment companies and insurance companies”.

The first statement said “I find most communications on financial matters are pretty dull and uninteresting.” 72% agreed.

The second statement said “I very rarely get the impression that the people who write these things have any real understanding of me and what makes me tick.” 66% agreed, and nearly 80% of the over 65s respondents.

And the third statement said “There is too much jargon and small print in financial communications.” 86% agreed with that, 71% agreeing strongly. Only 3% disagreed strongly.

Those three findings – ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, clients, prospects, competitors, everyone involved in briefing and producing financial communications – represent the challenge that our consumers are throwing at us. Because here is the terrible truth: it’s not financial matters that consumers find indescribably, impossibly, appallingly tedious. It’s us.

We have one good excuse. More and more, our regulator, the FSA, forces us to be this way. Preposterously, the big idea at Canary Wharf is that the best way to help consumers engage with financial services is to insist that our communications have to carry more and more and more and more warnings and caveats and disclaimers. You may say that that is the most asinine and mind-blowingly ill-conceived action you’ve ever heard of. It isn’t. The most asinine and ill-conceived thing was our failure as an industry to stand up to these buffoons when they inflicted this rubbish upon us.

This lunacy is the one thing that does make our challenge very difficult, at least until we get a 24/7 picket established outside the FSA’s offices in Canary Wharf and start fighting for a return to some kind of sanity.

But apart from that – and obviously it is a biggish ‘apart from’ – the challenge is really amazingly obvious and clear. We simply have to start making this stuff interesting for people.

It really isn’t hard. They think it’s interesting and important already. All we have to do is avoid boring their socks off. We can do this, or at least we could if the FSA would let us.

There’s a big win in it for those who get it right. We all readily accept, for example, that the big reason why First Direct maintains such astonishing customer loyalty is the quality of its service. But equally, one of the ways that First Direct generates interest from its target market in the first place is simply by making the whole business of banking look – in its ads, its website, its brochures – unusually, well, interesting.

Of course you can’t use quantitative research predictively, but with the First Direct case in mind we put one last financial statement to our respondents: “All other things being equal, I’d prefer to be a customer of financial companies that make what they can do for me sound interesting.”

Just about six out of ten agreed with that idea, over three out of ten agreeing strongly. In a market where it’s so hard to find compelling and differentiating propositions for customers, doesn’t this one sound as if it’s worth a try?