Invisible Brand

The financial establishment – including the FSA – has a vested interest in baffling the poor old consumer, says Lucian Camp

The trouble with doing anything professionally is that you lose the ability to engage with it as an amateur. It’s many years now since I played the bass guitar for a living, but even so, much of the time, when I listen to music all I can hear is the bass line. Having worked for a while as a publisher’s reader deciding whether manuscripts stood a chance of commercial success, you can guess how I respond when I read a book. And of course it’s been ages since I lost the ability to respond to advertising as a consumer rather than as an adman.

But the funny thing is that every now and then, something gets through my defences, and just for a brief moment I do see it more or less as a real person sees it. And it’s usually a more than somewhat disconcerting experience.

Telling you this story requires me to admit that this is the year of my SRD – my Selected Retirement Date. (This does not, of course, mean that it’s the year I’m going to retire. It just means that long ago, when I started my pension and had to nominate an SRD, I had the preposterous belief that by the age of 55 I’d be so rich, and so glutted on success, that it would obviously be time to pack up and lead a life of leisure for the rest of my days. Ah, the arrogance of the young.)

Anyway. Because it’s the year of my SRD, my pension provider wrote to me recently asking me to communicate my intentions. Enclosed with the letter, there was a booklet from the FSA – one in their snappily-titled “MONEYmadeclear” series – with the title “No selling. No jargon. Just the facts about your pension – it’s time to choose.” And for some reason – maybe because it was, after all, so directly relevant to my situation – I found myself reading it as a punter rather than as a copywriter or a creative director.

As a punter, I can’t really find the words to tell you everything that was wrong with it. For one thing, it turns out that most of the ideas in that long and complicated title are misleading. It’s not really time to choose, unless you count doing nothing as a choice. It’s not really “just the facts about my pension” – it’s actually almost all about annuities, and there’s another guide in the series which is about pensions.

But most importantly, it’s stuffed with bloody jargon. Even on the first page, one of the three sub-heads is the word “Commutation”, a word which in 20 years of financial copywriting even I’ve never heard before. But this is just an aperitif to warm you up for the main text, where you’ll soon find yourself grappling with sentences like: “This guide is not for you if: you’re getting a pension from an occupational salary-related (final salary) pension scheme.”

If the people at the FSA don’t understand that this is a perfect example of the worst and most repellent kind of financial jargon, then I despair of them. That string of words at the end of the sentence, “occupational salary-related (final salary) pension scheme,” is exactly the sort of thing that’ll make most readers of this booklet give up in despair – totally incomprehensible and intolerably boring in equal measure.

I could go on line by line through this miserable booklet highlighting its follies and misjudgements – while, of course, not forgetting its hateful design, with rafts of dreary Helvetica supposedly “enlivened” with splashes of cheap-looking bright colours and wacky asymmetrical boxes and panels. But actually, that’s not where I want to go with this piece at all. Apart from anything else, I feel too sorry for the copywriter and designer who took on this poisoned chalice of a brief.

What this guide actually tells you – the ubermessage, if you like – is, very simply, that making a considered decision about what to do with your pension pot at retirement is about a million miles beyond the financial capabilities of most people (including, I must say, me).

Given that choosing the right option is really quite important, there are, as far as I can see, only three ways that this can happen: As such, it’s another example of a theme that seems clearer and clearer to me all the time: that with only a few exceptions, today’s world of financial services simply hasn’t been designed and built in a way that makes it possible for ordinary people to find their way around it.

Those of us working in marketing and communications tend to believe that we can solve this problem: that if we communicate engagingly enough, avoid jargon and resist the temptation to dwell on the detail of “what’s under the bonnet”, we can make everything clear.

Sometimes this is true. When we’re dealing either with simpler parts of the market, or with more engaged and knowledgeable consumers, or both, we’re in with a chance.

But much more often, when we’re dealing with extremely complicated parts of the market – like choosing income options at retirement – and a huge range of generally unengaged and ignorant consumers, we haven’t got a chance. And we don’t do anyone any favours – least of all our consumers themselves – by pretending that we have.

As I said, I could make all sorts of detailed criticisms of the way the writer and designer have tackled this FSA booklet, but the real criticism is that they should never have taken on the brief in the first place. If all of us responsible for financial communications were more willing to refuse suicide missions like this one, there’d be a lot less of the pointless tokenism that my “MONEYmadeclear” guide represents.