Invisible Brand

Have Egg’s new owners gone mad, asks Paul Gordon, or is it just that they don’t really understand the values of the brand they now own?

Glee. It's one of those brilliant Old English words for which there really isn't any exact equivalent. We all know what it means – but how exactly do you define it?

Well, to be exact, it's the way that the rest of the credit card industry felt when they read about Egg giving notice to 160,000 customers who failed their new, Citibank-designed credit scoring system. The glee continued unabated for quite a while. The longer the story ran, the worse it got. At times, it seemed as if most, if not even maybe all, of the 160,000 could only be the victims of some kind of bizarre error or practical joke. There were nuns, High Court judges, multi-millionaires and any number of highly responsible middle-class Sophies and Alexanders who had always paid their balances off in full every month – all bounced out at 35 days' notice by a system which loudly and publicly branded them all as bad credit risks and thoroughly unwanted customers.

Financial services has known more than its fair share of PR disasters, but the industry really hadn't seen anything like this since Barclays launched its "A Big World Needs A Big Bank" campaign on the day it announced the closure of 400 branches. That blunder stemmed from a left hand/right hand unco-ordination thing, and I suspect it horrified Barclays' management as soon as it came to light. But I'd guess that the Egg thing was different – that the new Citibank management knew exactly what they were about to do, but had no idea at all of the consequences. If I'm right about that, then I think I'm right for two reasons.

First, the Citibank culture is American. In America, people can handle a general level of financial frankness that we just can't be doing with here. It starts with the fact that in America it's entirely acceptable to ask people what they earn, and it ripples out from there. To tell a High Court judge that you're cancelling his credit card because he's a bad risk is an unremarkable and everyday event. Citibank culturally has no idea that here, it's a message that combines offence and humiliation on a pretty much unrivallable scale. To get beyond it, you'd have to say that you're cancelling his credit card because of certain images that you've found on the hard drive of his computer.

But the second reason for the competitors' glee, and the card-holders' horror, and the media's excitement, is that this wasn't any old credit card. This was Egg. And probably more than any other brand in the financial services landscape, Egg stood for a different, newer, fresher, better world – a world of empathy, of fairness, of standing-shoulder-to-shoulder-ness, a world in which all the bad, angering, humiliating, manipulative practices of the financial world have been swept away and replaced by something like a personal friendship between the company and its customers.

To find Egg indulging in such public humiliation is incredible. It shakes the very foundations of our understanding of the world. What the hell happened to that Egg we knew and loved? Launch-era Egg, when Zoë Ball looked us squarely in the eye and told us that yes, she had been paid to appear in the commercial? Talk-to-the-glove Egg, authors of one of the funniest financial commercials ever made (weedy young man insults fat bastard in white van)? Or even much more recent tested-on guinea-pigs Egg, with another excellent campaign that highlighted the difference between the brand and its established old-world competitors?

Well, one thing's for sure, Citibank didn't test that card-cancelling initiative on any guinea pigs. If they had, the cages would have been full of their corpses.

What are the learnings from all this? Even minus the 160,000 and all the other Eggmen and Eggwomen who will cancel their cards in dismay, it may be that the acquisition was a cost-effective way for Citibank to acquire a UK credit card customer base. And even though the sale price fell far short of their expectations, selling off the business may still have been the least bad option for the Pru, Egg's original owners and parents, faced with a business unit that they simply couldn't move into profit.

I won't pretend to understand the complicated nature of the transaction. Perhaps in the same way that Citibank doesn't understand brand issues.

Brands, as more or less everyone outside Citibank knows, are promises of behaviour, ways of creating clarity about what people can expect. No-one would be in the least surprised if MBNA or Capital One told Philip Green, the Duke of Westminster, Bill Gates or even the Queen that they were cancelling their card because they'd failed their credit scoring tests. It's the sort of thing that MBNA, the Millwall of card issuers, might very likely do for fun. It's because we thought Egg was so different that the behaviour is so shocking.

In our brand development process, we place great emphasis on the kinds of behaviours that are consistent with, and beneficial for the brand. To be honest, until now we haven't placed anything like as much emphasis on the other side of the coin – the kinds of behaviours that will be most dangerous and damaging. I suppose we might have thought that it was too obvious to be worth saying.

Maybe we need to think again about that. If the Citibank-Egg affair tells us anything about brands and branding, it tells us that when there is no cultural affinity at all between a brand and its owners, there's nothing about the brand and its successful management that's too obvious to be worth saying.