Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp on 'Education' in marketing

A memorable headline, written as I recall for a US campaign raising funds for schools: IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE. Hard to argue with that. Big picture, if the 21st Century economy is the Knowledge Economy, then the knowledge has to come from somewhere.

But here’s a trickier question. What’s the connection – if any – between education and consumer marketing? Is creating a ‘better educated’ consumer a sensible, and indeed achievable, marketing task? Across most of the industry, and across many years, there has been a simple answer to this question: ‘No’.

Of course no-one would question the use of mildly-educational product propositions in order to differentiate: for some reason Sony telling us that you get better TV pictures with flatter, squarer tubes and Sainsbury’s talking us through the way it marinates its olives come to mind. But these do not represent serious attempts to give us basic groundings in electronic engineering or food production.

But especially in the world of financial services, the concept of educational marketing (‘Marducation’? ‘Eduarketing’?) seems to be all the go at the moment.

It looks as if two forces have combined to create this trend. On the one hand the government, and its agent the FSA, have decided that if people are going to take control of their financial futures (i.e., if the State isn’t) then they’re going to need to know what they’re doing.And on the other hand the industry, looking for strategies that’ll persuade consumers to dislike and distrust it a bit less, has hit upon the theory of creating consumer empowerment.As we all know, knowledge is power – and arguably education is knowledge. As a result, most big financial institutions now have educational material coming out of their ears.

I suppose it started a few years ago with the dreaded Key Features Document – the regulationdriven insomnia cure which is supposed to tell people everything they need to know about a financial product to try to stop them buying it.

But it certainly didn’t stop there. A little later, for example, there was the avalanche of ISA Guides. Quite frankly, if I had a pound for every one of those I’d written, I could go to the limit in a cash mini-ISA myself. And there’s no shortage of bigger, thicker guides to the whole business of saving and investment (you can get a particularly lavish example free of charge from norwichunion.com).

Most large financial institutions are spending much time and effort on getting branded educational materials into school classrooms. (When our sister PR company, Hill Murray PR, invited representatives from major institutions to attend a seminar on the subject recently, the response was so enthusiastic that they had to fight them off with sticks.) And the FSA, and indeed the industry’s own Raising Standards initiative, keep cranking up the pressure to accompany all product marketing communications with ever-more elaborate explanations. Others in different sectors of the service economy look on all this with amazement. Choosing the right provider for a £7,000 ISA investment is important. But so is choosing a reliable car, a home that’ll appreciate in value, an appropriate mobile phone contract, even the lowest plane fare.

Car dealers, estate agents and travel agents don’t feel a tenth of the obligation – or regulatory pressure – to ‘empower’ consumers to make fullyinformed decisions in any of these areas.

As a result, most consumers make objectively bad purchase decisions.They choose the wrong cars, live in the wrong houses, go on the wrong holidays.

And here’s the key point: unless their choice turns out to be really terrible, they don’t care.

In every market there are hobbyists, who want and need detailed information. Perfectly sensible to make it available to them – and easier now to do so: one of the things we’ve all learned from the Internet is how to ‘layer’ information so that consumers can drill down as deep as they want.

But beyond the hobbyists, is there any evidence at all that educational marketing addresses any real consumer need?

I’d say that on the contrary, there’s clear evidence that it fails at three levels.

First, the huge majority of people simply aren’t getting educated. Levels of financial misunderstanding (and non-understanding, which isn’t quite the same thing) remain terrifyingly high. Do you know the investment limits for the three ISA components? Or the maximum permitted charges on stakeholder pensions? You do? I’m impressed, provided that you don’t work in financial marketing.

Second, it never sounded very likely that consumers would show their gratitude for being educated by buying lots of products from the companies that kindly educated them, and so it has proved. Brands like Barclays’ doomed b2, which took on a self-generated ‘mission to explain’ the joys of investment to unsophisticated consumers, found that the consumers in question stayed away in droves.

Virgin, too, after making a flying start, became infected with a nasty bout of Schoolmaster Syndrome both in its investments business and its current account mortgage armVirgin One. These days, the sound of chalk on blackboard is so loud, it’s almost hard to remember that the providers have products to sell too.

And third and most fundamentally, the really depressing truth is that there’s no evidence that welleducated consumers do in fact make better financial decisions. Distressingly, it was the better-educated who chose Equitable Life as their pension provider.

And who believed that investment in technology stocks was too good an opportunity to miss. And who bought into the idea that an endowment was a better idea than a straight repayment mortgage. Members of the Educational Tendency would argue that the trouble with these people is that they weren’t educated enough. If only they’d understood a bit more, they’d have avoided the mistakes they made.

Pretty much everyone else would draw the opposite conclusion. If the government wants people to be financially literate, it should add financial education to the national curriculum. As for financial services providers, they have an obligation to give full and balanced information to the small minority of consumers who want it. But beyond this, they should recognise that ‘empowering’ consumers isn’t the same thing as lecturing them. Ultimately, the only kind of ‘empowerment’ that’s worth bothering with is the kind that leaves you free to make your own mistakes.