Invisible Brand

After happily boring people to death for decades, says Lucian Camp, the financial services industry is belatedly recognising the need to be interesting

I can’t say that I love the word, but I do very much like the idea it’s trying to express. It’s probably the Word Of The Year in financial services communications, appearing in more or less every paragraph of a huge range of documents and publications, from the report of the Thoresen Review on generic financial advice (sorry, Money Guidance), to virtually every pitch brief that we ever receive, to all the submissions in the various advertising effectiveness awards schemes, to major FSA initiatives like the RDR and TCF.

Have you guessed what it is yet? I’ll give you a clue: like many words these days, it was originally familiar in a completely different context, one to do with sparkly rings and getting down on one knee and nerve-wracking conversations with girlfriends’ fathers. Yes, you’ve got it: ENGAGEMENT.

When happy couples use the term, it means they’ve named the big day. When happy financial marketers use it, it means that at least they’ve named the big issue – the most important, most difficult and most fundamental barrier to effective marketing or indeed any kind of effective communication.

The thing is, most people most of the time are looking for reasons not to engage with most kinds of communication, especially marketing communication and even more especially financial services marketing communication. And, even on the rare occasions when they do engage with something, they’re still on a hair-trigger, looking for any reason or opportunity to disengage again.

Analogies always have their problems, but I tend to think of engaging consumers with communication as being a bit like engaging fish with fishing hooks. You attach the most attractive bait you can think of, and dangle it in the water hoping to catch their attention. Not very often, but now and again, they bite. And then you face the really hard part, which is reeling the line in and catching your fish in a situation where all they have to do, at any moment, is turn around and swim away from you and the line will snap and they’ll be gone.

For many, many years most financial services marketers were weirdly and disastrously unconcerned about engagement. It almost seemed as if they were going out of their way to ignore it, often choosing to prioritise other much less important problems that actually had the effect of decreasing the potential for engagement.

I’m thinking here particularly of the industry’s obsession with what it calls “clarity”, by which it actually means copy that is so dumbed-down and lacking in any kind of character, point of view or attitude that it is literally impossible to engage with. Or of the way that, at the insistence of the regulator, we’re also obliged to pad out our copy with irrelevant and untimely risk warnings which, again, serve only to disengage consumers with what we’re trying to say to them. Or of the way that there’s often some pretty counter-productive stuff in the brand guidelines, requiring us to waste people’s time with vacuous corporate blather which serves only to discourage them from staying interested for long enough to take on board what we really want to say.

But although obstacles to engagement like these are fading fairly slowly, at least the absolute importance of engagement as the first and necessary precondition to effective communication is rapidly gaining acceptance. And of course, having once decided that engagement is a vital element, the next question must be how to achieve it.

The best possible solution would be by means of a very high level of personal relevance. I’ve often sung the praises of the most engaging direct marketing letter I’ve ever received – from a local IFA specialising in employee benefits for the advertising industry, whose letter to me began with the brilliant line “HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT OTHER CREATIVE DIRECTORS EARN?”

Financial clients’ capabilities in data management are, no question, gradually improving, but it’s still very, very unusual to be able to target a message as precisely as this. Much more often we’re in the kind of unhappy position that I found myself in recently, writing a mailing about Child Trust Funds without knowing whether or not the recipients had children and beginning my letter “Whether or not you’re a parent…”

But even when it’s not possible to engage by means of specific, personal insight, the next best thing is to find universal insights that everyone – or more or less everyone – can engage with.

Money being powerful, emotionally-charged stuff, and connecting as it does to so many of the most important plans, dreams, hopes and fears in our minds, this shouldn’t be difficult. In any amount of research, for example, people say that the three most important subjects of all in their minds are family relationships, money and health: on this basis, I once said to the marketing director of a company providing low-cost family health plans, which obviously by definition tick all three boxes, that his firm’s communications ought to be the most engaging of any product or service in the consumer economy. They weren’t, though. At that time, they were crashingly generic, manipulative and dull.

There are already a few highly engaging financial campaigns. Some, indeed, have been around for years: the insight in Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign particularly stands out for its power to engage in an otherwise largely-desperate category.

But up until now, those who’ve been worrying about engagement have seemed like a slightly eccentric minority, preoccupied with something slightly peripheral in the way that birdwatchers or trainspotters are. Quite suddenly – for reasons that I don’t understand, but warmly welcome whatever they are – engagement has moved from the fringes to the centre of the stage. And as a writer of financial communications, I honestly don’t think I can imagine a more positive development.