Invisible Brand

As it becomes harder to define the average consumer, Mark Humphrys ponders whether it’s time for a rethink on direct marketing in financial services? And just how do we engage our audience’s attention long enough for them not to recycle but to respond? Perhaps the answer lies within...

I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to believe it’s time for a bit of a rethink about the way we tackle direct marketing in financial services.

I’ve worked in the area for over 20 years, both on the client side and the agency side, and I like to think I’ve had my fair share of successes – maybe a little more than my fair share. I like to think, too, that I’ve played my part in a number of innovations and evolutions in the field – nothing too dramatic, but a new way of slicing and dicing the data here, a new approach to the use of incentives there, a new self-mailer format there.And like any good direct marketer, I’ve always believed as a matter of faith in the core philosophy of test-and-refine: that 99 times out of a hundred, the right approach is to start with what worked best on the last most similar occasion, and look for ways to do it that little bit better next time.

They say that over the billions of years since our world was created, evolution hasn’t developed in a straight line. We’re told there have been long periods when nothing much happened, and then very short periods of dramatic change in which all of a sudden newts grew feathers and became birds, or whatever. I’m starting to think it’s time for financial services direct marketing to move into one of those periods of dramatic change and grow feathers, so to speak, of its own.

In saying this, I’m not – on this occasion at least – talking primarily about the rapidly-evolving role of the internet as a direct marketing medium. It is, of course, a very powerful medium, and, mercifully, one that isn’t prone to the alarmingly high level of opt-outs currently being recorded with the MPS and TPS. Among its many obvious advantages, perhaps the most important is that at last, it means that we now have access to a medium that makes all those approaches to segmentation and personalisation that we’ve been talking about for a generation affordable and achievable. (Perhaps the second most important is that it levels the playing field between large institutions and small ones, enabling small ones to compete on level terms without that sense of puniness and amateurishness that you somehow always get from their offline campaigns.)

But as I say, on this occasion I’m not talking about that.In fact, I’m not really talking about the use of media at all: I’m talking about another issue which I think now needs urgent attention if financial direct marketing is to continue to develop and prosper.

The issue in question revolves around what is these days one of financial services’ very favourite words:engagement. It seems that these days, almost everyone worries that consumers don’t engage enough with financial services, financial brands and financial communications – everyone, that is, except those responsible for most b2c financial direct marketing. Of course it’s dangerous and foolish to generalise, and a number of organisations have produced highly engaging, distinctive and rewarding direct marketing campaigns over the years: for a long time now, First Direct has done especially well.

But on the whole, it’s a land that time forgot – a land without freshness, originality of insight, wit, reward, or serious innovation in concept, copy, visuals or execution. It’s a world where tired old campaigners, often June Whitfield, mine thinner and thinner seams, and the closest you’ll get to a radical breakthrough is the generational shift to the two Carols, Vorderman and Smillie. And if you think I’m going too far, ask yourself when you last saw a financial direct response ad, or received a mailpack, which rewarded your attention in any way at all.

Of course many of these grim campaigns still “work,” although over time direct marketers are finding themselves kings of a shrinking kingdom: again leaving aside the internet, the number of product categories and consumer segments where the ROI is worth the bother has been dwindling steadily for at least a decade. But even campaigns which in their own terms still “work” can still be contributing to the overall malaise. There is evidence, for example, that people are much more likely to watch TV commercials when they find them enjoyable, and much more likely to channel-hop or tune out when they don’t. In micro terms, crude, manipulative, shouty, boring DRTV commercials may generate adequate returns. In macro terms, they can still be another nail in the coffin of the golden-egg-laying goose.

The really odd thing is that fresh, engaging, rewarding, distinctive direct marketing communications aren’t really any harder or more expensive to produce than, well, the other sort. You can, of course, be the hundredth financial direct marketer to choose that toe-curling royalty-free image of the shoe-and-sockless American in the business suit gambolling on the beach at the water’s edge, or that even more tragic one of the toddler in the bowler hat “reading” the Financial Times. But you don’t have to– there are thousands of less soul-destroying images that are equally available.(To see a small selection, take a look at our own hugely successful, long-running and multiple-award-winning campaign for the children’s savings scheme, Jump.)

Two things can make creating engagement with financial DM genuinely difficult. One – mentioned briefly above – is dependence on dodgy data, especially in mail: if you know nothing about the person you’re talking to, it’s hugely much harder to know how to engage them. The other – not mentioned above, but often the subject of vehement tirades from my esteemed colleague Mr Camp – is regulation. The FSA now obliges us to festoon our copy with so much meaningless mumbo-jumbo that you do sometimes wonder if Canary Wharf has been taken over by a group of surrealists who are having one of the world’s best-ever jokes at our expense.

These are serious handicaps, but there’s just about enough evidence to prove that they’re not impossible to overcome. Ultimately, creating engaging financial direct marketing communications requires only one thing: a commitment to do so on the part of all those involved in the project. I’m happy to sign up to that commitment for myself, and for my colleagues here at Tangible Financial. Are you willing to do the same?