Time was when it wasn't difficult to grasp a company's core purpose – at least, the purpose of a public company with external shareholders. Such firms would invariably express their purpose in terms of their responsibility to those shareholders. Their primary responsibility, the management teams would say, was to deliver shareholder value.

Somewhere in their shareholder communications – perhaps most frequently in their Annual Report – most public companies still say this. And in terms of the formalities of corporate governance, it is of course still true. The first responsibility of a firm's management is to deliver value to shareholders: that is the basis on which the shareholders have agreed to put them, and keep them, in their posts.

Back in the proudly mercenary days of the 1980s, this was more or less all that a firm had to say about its purpose. In his book Capitalism and Freedom, economist Milton Friedman, favourite guru of the political right, wrote: ‘There is one and only one social responsibility of business: … to increase its profits’. In the climate of those days, saying anything else could sound feeble. In the heyday of privatisation, state-owned and mutual enterprises that were not driven by shareholder pressure seemed lazy and uncommercial. The introduction of private capital was widely perceived as a bracing, energy-giving development that could only improve performance.

(For some reason this widespread feeling spread right across the UK public sector with the sole, but significant, exception of the NHS. Many people deeply hostile to state ownership continue to believe that the health service must never fall into private investors' hands.)

However, over the years since the Gordon Gecko-driven lunch-is-for-wimps 1980s, things have changed. It has become increasingly clear that defining purpose solely in terms of shareholder value presents two big problems.

The lesser is that it sounds terrible to everyone else. If you take the view that the role of management is actually to try to achieve some kind of positive accommodation between shareholders, staff, customers and other stakeholders, then emphasising one of these constituencies to the exclusion of the other two gives a very bad impression.

But the greater is that in itself, it doesn't of course say anything at all about how this shareholder value is to be achieved. It's absolutely not in any sense directional, or aspirational, or motivational, or inspirational, or any other word ending in –ational. At a certain statement-of-the-bleedin'-obvious level it may remind the firm's management of the need to be financially successful, and perhaps at a slightly deeper level it reminds management that whatever it is that they're doing, have done or want to do in the future they need to be able to claim that it has helped, is helping or will help create shareholder value. But that's about all.

As a result, while creating shareholder value generally remains in place as the highest-level summation of corporate purpose, a considerable industry has grown up around the need to define purpose at the next level down: how is this value to be created? Virtually every firm now has something to say on this subject, and of course a huge amount has been written. One of the first to define this second level of purpose was management consulting legend Peter Drucker, who wrote as early as 1954 that ‘There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer’.

As we shall see in this chapter, though, it remains a problematic area, and perhaps particularly so in the field of financial services. While some firms are certainly driven by clear and strong senses of purpose, many have made distinctly half-hearted or superficial efforts to define and articulate them. As a proof, if you asked a thousand people from a hundred businesses, it would be interesting to know how many of them could state their own business's core purpose. We'd pretty confidently guess that as usual when you ask people things, the outcome could be represented as a classic triangle – a few at the top who can quote it verbatim, a larger group in the middle who have a rough idea and a much larger group at the bottom who either don't know, or state with varying levels of confidence that their business doesn't have one.

What's more, among the verbatim-quoters, we're inclined to think that there wouldn't be an awful lot of difference between the purposes they came up with. Most, we strongly suspect, would consist of highly polished forms of words expressing the firm's determination in one way or another to work for the betterment of humanity, or at least that part of humanity who have become customers.

(And, by the way, if business's purposes are less than apparent to their employees, how much more opaque are they to their customers? You might imagine that if a firm is driven on to do what it does, in the way that it does it, by some deeply-held and passionate commitment to a purpose, some faint sense of what it is might be visible to people who do business with it. However, we challenge any financial services firm to achieve an unprompted customer research percentage score on ‘understanding of corporate purpose’ that gets into double figures.)

The fact is, there's so much bullshit and lip-service to be found around the area of corporate purpose that it's tempting – very tempting – to believe there isn't anything there of any substance at all. But as we'll go on to argue, there certainly is some substance there. And it's a kind of substance that can make a fundamental difference to the role and nature of marketing within organisations.

Let's start our exploration of this difficult but important subject by considering why it's viewed with so much cynicism and scepticism both outside and very often inside organisations.

The obvious explanation can't be ignored: what's being said so often just doesn't seem to be in any way true.¹ Anthony, who travels a lot, is invariably infuriated when he calls American Express in the UK. It doesn't matter if he's calling at 3 in the morning or the afternoon, more often than not he gets the same message: ‘Unfortunately we are experiencing a high level of calls at the moment’. He might believe them once, or twice, but not every time he calls.The world of corporate purpose – and indeed all those other high-falutin' definitions like mission, vision, values, essence and all the rest of it – is full of this kind of obvious and blatant contradiction. In fact, it's rare to encounter an organisation where the level of contradiction isn't immediately and laughably obvious.

Let's play a guessing game. Which company, describing its values, said among many other similar things:

We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, then we won't do it.

Yes, you got it, the corrupt, dishonest and manipulative (and before long spectacularly bankrupt) US corporation called Enron.

Whose mission statement is this?

To produce fashionable products in an ethical way and demonstrate a responsible attitude towards people and the environment.

This of course is Arcadia Group, the business owned and run by that controversial entrepreneur Sir Philip Green.

One more? Okay. Who wouldn't want to be treated at a health-care institution with these fine values?

We deliver personalised care of the highest quality, with the best possible outcomes for users and carers, empowering them to remain independent.

Excellent, but rightly or wrongly you may react with a little scepticism when you know that this is the statement of purpose made by the NHS healthcare trust which runs Stafford Hospital, a few years ago the subject of one of the most damning reports on quality of care ever produced in this country.

That's enough of this game – it's too easy to play. To research examples, all you have to do is think of terrible companies or organisations, and google them together with the words ‘purpose’, ‘vision’, ‘mission’ and ‘values’.

So what are we saying here? Are we saying that this kind of rhetoric is in fact completely discredited? Well, actually, no. Just because most of something isn't very good, that doesn't mean it's all bad. And anyway, when you look at what's written in tablets of stone on a company's website, you're looking in the wrong place. If it's just a statement on the website, then it's just front-office flim-flam, designed for public consumption. The real test of a company's priorities happens when you work there, and something's gone horribly wrong, and it's late and everyone wants to go home, and if you just delete a file or two no-one will ever know. Someone once said that your ethics define what you do when no-one is watching. Someone else said, a little less memorably, that a company's true values are the answers to the question, ‘What does a person have to do to get on around here?’ Ethics and values, granted, aren't the same thing as corporate purpose, but they're ingredients in the same minestrone. If one is cosmetic fiction, they probably all are. And if one is for real, they're probably all real, too.

Let's see if we can devise some background tests – some checks to which customers can submit organisations to get a fix on how likely that stated purpose is to be for real.

BACKGROUND TEST 1: HAS THE STATED PURPOSE BEEN ADOPTED RECENTLY?

If so, then right now it's unlikely to be for real as far as your experience as a customer is concerned. Even if the business's management team want it to be real (as opposed to just wanting something to say on the new website), it's likely to take years to embed the purpose into the beliefs and behaviours of the people in the organisation. If the purpose is significantly different from the previous one (or indeed if there wasn't a previous one), it's going to take even longer, and very likely involve the replacement of staff members too deeply entrenched in the former mindset. But, all this said, we've never seen an organisation admit to being ‘in the early stages of trying to live up to a new purpose’: firms would always have us believe that they're 100% there already. Can't be true.

BACKGROUND TEST 2: IS THE ORGANISATION LARGE, COMPLICATED AND SILOED?

If so, that's another very bad sign. In fact, a terrible sign. Organisations that fit this description are extremely, exceptionally unlikely to own any shared culture or values at all, let alone something as fundamental as a purpose. Typically more or less the only thing that unites the various parts of organisations like this is a shared and passionate desire to do other parts of the business down.

We're touching here on one of the recurring themes of this book, which is that everything involved in good marketing is incomparably more difficult in large, complicated and siloed businesses. In Chapter 17, on branding, we argue that from a marketing perspective, it doesn't really make sense to think of these as single entities at all, ultimately because achieving change across the entity as a whole is just impossible. It's not just about size: after all, in the end the proverbial supertanker can be manoeuvred, although not nimbly. It's more about lack of cohesion: as a nautical analogy, managing a business like this is more like manoeuvring a fleet of miscellaneous vessels, large and small, fast and slow, each with their own captains and crew and without any effective communications system to tell them which way to go.

There's a slight difference of opinion between your authors here, with one (OK, it's Anthony) preferring to say that achieving change across organisations like these is almost unachievable. As an exception, he points to British Airways in the 1980s, where the management team led by Lord King and Colin Marshall did in fact achieve fundamental change across a big, complex, long-established, siloed organisation in a remarkably short period of time. It's a pity that you have to go back 30 years and to a different industry for an example, though, and it may be the exception that proves the rule.

BACKGROUND TEST 3: SIMILARLY, AS A CUSTOMER, ARE YOU DEALING WITH A PERIPHERAL PART OF A LARGE, COMPLEX BUSINESS?

If so, the part you're dealing with is particularly unlikely to share the sense of purpose of the whole. The statement of corporate purpose will almost certainly have been dumped on the business unit in question, whether it makes any sense or not. One of your authors, running a financial specialist creative agency committed to originality and creativity, found himself landed with the need to express a purpose developed by the parent group, essentially to do with achieving excellence in data-driven communications for the pharmaceutical industry. Needless to say, his agency's website displayed this idea in extremely small type.

BACKGROUND TEST 4: HOW IS THE BUSINESS'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS EXTERNAL SHAREHOLDERS?

We all know that formally, the first responsibility of the management in a public company is to the shareholders. But what does that really mean? A participant in one of our Financial Services Forum focus groups expresses a commonly held view among business managers, saying:

You need to have a purpose which … will lead to sustainable, positive outcomes for your shareholders, otherwise you won't get … their patience to continue to do it. But that doesn't mean it has to be out of kilter with what's good for customers and for staff as well. To generate real, sustainable value for your shareholders, you have to be in sync with your customers.

This sounds admirably consistent and sustainable. But insofar as there's an unresolved aspect here, it's almost always about time scales. Conflicts between shareholder interests and customer and/or staff interests are usually about the short-term versus the long term. Management typically argues that an action that will pay off for customers or staff in the short term will pay off for shareholders in the longer term: shareholders will not infrequently reply that they'd rather have their jam today, even if there's a little less of it. That said, some shareholders can be remarkably patient when they're confident that there will indeed be a greater quantity of jam tomorrow. Different investors can have very different time scales – but what none of them likes is when management promises something and then fails to deliver.

BACKGROUND TEST 5: IS THE BUSINESS FINDING IT EASY TO MAKE MONEY?

It's easy to overlook, or underestimate, this rather obvious question. The fact is, the huge majority of deviations from firms' purposes, visions and values happen when the immediate pressure to make a buck gets too great. That infuriating call-centre hold-message isn't exactly a lie: the company really does believe that every customer's phone call is important. So how can it possibly leave calls unanswered for 37 minutes? Quite simply, because it doesn't think it can afford to recruit more staff. (This may be one of those shareholders versus customers, short-term versus long-term issues described under the previous heading, although, in our experience, most shareholders don't like businesses with dissatisfied customers.) Businesses that find it easy to make money don't often have to grapple with this kind of squeeze.²

Those five tests should give you an initial fix on the likely credibility of pretty much any stated purpose (or at least, any purpose other than making as much money as possible as quickly as possible, which isn't something you hear often.) At this point we need to become more specific and look at the kinds of purposes that firms may want – hopefully credibly – to claim.

Both of your authors have founded, managed and sold businesses, but only Anthony has done so in a financial services firm. On the basis of this experience, he says, ‘No financial services business can claim any kind of commitment to good marketing unless its fundamental aim is to give its customers a better product, service or experience’.

If he's right, this is clearly a hugely important point that begs a hugely important question: how many financial institutions do fundamentally aim to give their customers a better product, service or experience?

One answer comes from our Financial Services Forum members online research. We asked our sample to what extent people in their own organisations would accept Anthony's point.

Only a very small minority of respondents – fewer than 1 in 10 – told us that the point was accepted throughout their organisation. Nearly two-thirds said it was accepted in ‘some parts’ of their organisation. But one in five said it was accepted only in the marketing department, and one in eight said that acceptance was weak even there.

Our first reaction, especially to this last finding, was astonishment. Can there really be marketers who don't believe that their business should aim to give its customers a better product, service or experience? It's a question that deserves further exploration.

Trying as hard as we can to be fair, we've been considering the word ‘better’. ‘Better how?’ we've asked, in a pale imitation of Joe Pesci's legendary Goodfellas scene. Better than everyone else? Better than it was before? Better than what? Maybe we operate in such crowded and competitive markets that to be ‘as good as’ is enough. Maybe offering a good, or very good, product, service or experience is satisfactory. But we're not convinced.

Anyway, on this more limited basis, we reviewed the forms of words some firms used to define their purpose, starting with the Big Four High Street banking groups.³ In alphabetical order, Barclays (defining values introduced by Anthony Jenkins) says:

What are Barclays' Purpose And Values?

At Barclays, our common purpose is to help people achieve their ambitions – in the right way. We'll measure and reward our people, not just on commercial results, but on how they live our Values and bring them to life every day.

HSBC says:

Who we are and what we do

Throughout our history we have been where the growth is, connecting customers to opportunities. We enable businesses to thrive and economies to prosper, helping people fulfil their hopes and dreams and realise their ambitions. This is our role and purpose.

Lloyds says:

OUR PURPOSE

Helping Britain prosper

Through our branches and businesses, our Group has the potential to reach every family, business and community in the UK. We place immense value on our purpose, helping Britain prosper, driven by our desire to give back to the communities in which we operate.

And RBS says:

At RBS, our purpose is to serve customers well. We serve around 24 million customers across the globe, and our aim is to consistently meet their needs wherever they find us.

In their unexpectedly different ways, you have to say that these aren't bad efforts. All are clearly anxious about the derision sure to result from an overclaim: it doesn't take a PhD in semiotics to realise that these are organisations aware that they command little public trust and have a great deal of scepticism to contend with. But all try to go at least one step beyond pure platitude, aware that 100% pure platitude generates derision in its own right.

Barclays, perhaps the bravest of the four, tiptoes up toward the suicidally dangerous area of bankers' bonuses with its form of words about how they ‘measure and reward’ their people. HSBC plays the international card, hinting at its strength in Asia – they tell us they're ‘where the growth is’, an idea rather more focused on the business than on the customer. Lloyds, on the contrary, describes its purpose in wholly UK-centric terms – they're ‘helping Britain prosper’. And poor old RBS, still in the hole to the taxpayer to the tune of £50-odd billion, can aspire to no more than a modest aim to ‘serve customers well’ and ‘meet their needs’, neither of which is a thought to stir the spirits.

But the more we think about them, the more we realise that all four run into trouble at not just one, but actually two different levels.

The first is the obvious one: the four banks' recent histories, and the public perceptions currently existing as a result. As we absorb these valiant efforts, we're painfully aware of the extent to which delivery against them has been, well, patchy, to say the least. RBS may promise to ‘serve customers well’, but newspaper headlines are still reminding us that not so long ago, in the years after the 2008 crash, the Global Restructuring Group in its NatWest business was deliberately driving hundreds of viable businesses into bankruptcy so that it could pick up their assets for a song. The same HSBC that prides itself on ‘connecting customers to opportunities’ was in fact paying a E300 million fine as recently as November 2017 for connecting some of its more affluent customers to Swiss-based tax evasion opportunities that were proved in court to be criminal. And of course while Barclays was setting about rewarding its people on ‘how they live [their] values’, a number of its corporate debt traders were at the forefront of the LIBOR-rigging scandal, and four received the prison sentences to prove it.

There is a real issue here: the extent to which any statement of purpose is discredited, or invalidated, by a one-bad-apple episode (and, if so, how long that discrediting or invalidation will last). You could certainly argue that if the stated purpose of an organisation employing well over a hundred thousand people in thousands of locations around the world is discredited by one person in any of these locations doing one bad thing, then the whole concept of stating any kind of purpose becomes untenable.

But to us, this is too simplistic. Given that there will always be bad apples, the real question is how managements react when one or more are found in the barrel. Were they up-front and honest about it, or did they deny it, begrudgingly owning up only when they had to? Did they issue the usual empty platitudes about ‘lessons being learnt’, or were there any signs of real action being taken to avoid a recurrence? And, perhaps most important, was there any sign of an effort to discover where responsibility lay? Your authors know hundreds of bankers in all of the UK's big banks but have never met one who was responsible (in any way, no matter how small) for PPI mis-selling.

In fact, being seen to deal with a malfeasance effectively can do more than just repair the damage. It's a curious quirk of human nature that it can leave us feeling more positive toward the organisation than if the malfeasance had never happened. On a smaller scale, one large hotel group that had invested heavily in a brilliant housekeeping service was said to make sure that guests would find one defect in their room when they checked in. The problem would be fixed so efficiently and courteously that the guests' perceptions of the hotel's service quality were higher than if their stay had been trouble-free.

But the second level of difficulty with the big banks' statements of purpose is the one that would arguably exist anyway, even without the faintest breath of recent scandal: the problems arising from the big banks' performance against numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 of our background tests outlined previously. It must surely be the case that all of these banks are far too large, too diverse and too siloed to be able to live up to any kind of corporate purpose across the totality of their businesses, and in any case the stated purposes are far too new and have not yet had anything like enough time to take root inside the organisations. And it's hard to believe they ever will. Even if top management were grimly determined, it would take God knows how long – 10 years, 20 years, 50 years – to convince every salesperson measured in one way or another on their sales performance that they were really and truly to be rewarded ‘on how they live our values and bring them to life every day’. It would be like trying to convince lions you were going to reward them on the basis of their kindness to wildebeest. And even if you did ever succeed in achieving this across your own pride of lions, as soon as a new one came in from another pride (analogy for recruiting a salesperson from elsewhere, or of course buying and merging with another sales-driven firm), they wouldn't get it and there'd be wildebeest body parts all over the place again.

As with everything to do with every aspect of building brands, it's all infinitely much more achievable in businesses that are not big, long-established, complex and siloed – in other words, which are small, young and simple. Sticking with banks for a few minutes longer, can you guess who stated this?

We pioneer banking that makes a positive difference to the lives of our customers and communities.

Not too hard, is it? It's the Co-operative Bank, which of course has become inextricably connected with a level of catastrophic mismanagement and misbehaviour far beyond any of the Big Four's travails – yet, amazingly, to your authors at any rate, its statement of purpose remains basically credible. They may have been chaired by a sex-fuelled junkie, and teetered on the brink of financial disaster, and they may now be owned by a bunch of hard-nosed US-based private equity firms. But at some level, it is still basically credible that they pioneer banking that makes a positive difference to the lives of their customers and communities. They put their money (and their customers money) where their mouths are.

Most financial services providers fit somewhere in between the hopeless fragmentation of a really big complex institution, and the straightforward simplicity of a single-channel niche player.

Here, for example, is another medium-sized bank, TSB:

We provide local banking for Britain to help local people, businesses and communities to thrive together.

Not quite as powerful or distinctive as the Co-operative Bank maybe, but there certainly is something there.

Here's a statement that works in a different way. What Nationwide does is much the same as quite a few others: it's who they are, as the UK's one remaining large building society, that is special:

Whether you bank with us, save with us or buy a home with us, we always have our members' best interests at heart and provide the great customer service you expect. Run for the benefit of our members, we really are on your side.

Aviva is a large, complex organisation, but does well to define an area of common ground that most of its business units can buy into:⁴

Our purpose is to free people from fear of uncertainty, allowing them to get on with their lives.

And finally Hargreaves Lansdown is able to reflect both the clarity of its proposition, and the focus of its targeting, in this simple and undeniable statement:

We aim to help you make more of your investments by giving you the tools and information to make your own informed decisions.

Let's be clear. The key point is not that in and of themselves, published statements of purpose like these, even when they are clear, credible and distinctive, make much difference to anything. The key point is that businesses that are able to express their purposes effectively, as these examples can, are businesses where marketers stand a chance of doing a great job. There is a basic direction here, a fundamental sense of what we do and indeed what we don't do, that gives a good marketing team something to build on.

Young, simple businesses that start with clear senses of purpose from the outset have a great opportunity to express them in the most visible way possible – that is, in their choice of name. You might think that Mother is a rather silly name for one of the UK's leading independent advertising agencies, but the word actually reinforces and reminds us of an idea that's understood by, and vitally important to, everyone who works there: that they should always ask themselves whether their mothers would be proud of what they've just done. The same was true, in the experience of one of your authors, of the direct insurance business MORE TH>N (in fact a semi-autonomous business unit within the RSA Group). Another odd name, but with another strong rationale: the intention was that whatever anyone in the firm was doing, they should always be able to explain how it offered customers more than what they would find elsewhere.

Both these firms embedded important aspects of their purpose in their names. That's a powerful thing to do, but it isn't always possible or practical. A clear purpose can still act as a positive and inspirational guide to behaviour even when a firm has a name as boring as, say, for example, Hargreaves Lansdown.

To emphasise this important point once more, imagine that you're in charge of marketing at RBS, and at Hargreaves Lansdown (seems unlikely you could do both, but we're just imagining). You look to the organisations' prominently displayed statements of purpose for guidance on the kind of direction you should take. RBS's says (remember?):

At RBS, our purpose is to serve customers well. We serve around 24 million customers across the globe, and our aim is to consistently meet their needs wherever they find us.

Hargreaves Lansdown states:

We aim to help you make more of your investments by giving you the tools and information to make your own informed decisions.

It really wouldn't be difficult to come up with a dozen ideas in twenty minutes that could reinforce and demonstrate that purpose of Hargreaves Lansdown's – but it would be very difficult indeed to think of anything that would do the same for RBS's.

We don't make this comparison to be unkind to RBS. In their circumstances, we have no idea what they could say that might be better. We're just saying that marketers should be able to do some great work at Hargreaves Lansdown, but it's going to be extremely hard going at RBS.

This distinction is so important, and so fundamental to what follows in this book about good marketing, that it's worth examining in a little more detail. Why exactly is it that Hargreaves Lansdown's stance gives marketers a great starting-point, while RBS gives them a very poor one?

At its simplest, it comes down to one of the marketing world's longest-established formulations, a three-question framework that, it's said, helps to reduce a proposition down to its simplest possible form. Those three questions are:

1. Who wants it?
2. What is it?
3. Why should they bother?

And the more clearly and distinctively they can be answered, the stronger the proposition of a business as a whole, and/or a particular product or service.

On this basis, here's a stab at Hargreaves Lansdown's purpose:

Here's a stab at RBS's statement:

Hargreaves Lansdown's formulation gets off to a flying start by reflecting such clarity about the people for whom the service is intended. We return many times in this book to the need to focus on the customer – to really focus on the customer, which is difficult, rather than just claiming to do so, which is easy. Hargreaves is an absolutely customer-centric business, and that's what's really good and special about it.

Across large swathes of financial services, though, this is still distressingly unusual. There's a remarkably simple test of customer centricity that delivers unscientific, but highly indicative results: visit organisations' websites, and see if they feature pictures of any of their customers.

Some sectors perform much better than others. Most building societies do show pictures of customers. Asset managers are terrible. At the time of writing, we've visited the websites of 16 large UK-based asset management firms' websites. Two showed images of customers. (It may or may not be significant that these two were Fidelity and Legal & General, two firms that appear to be somewhat more customer-focused, or at least customer-aware, than other asset managers.)

The truth is that this people-picture test may be more revealing than the lofty statements of corporate purpose. If you believe – which more or less everyone does these days – that it's what you do, not what you say that matters, then this almost complete failure to enter the customer's world is significant. It makes it look as if this simply isn't a place where the firms belong.

And of course for most asset managers, the simple truth is that it isn't. Although asset managers ultimately manage money for private individuals – a point which they frequently shorthand by referring to the end investor under the patronising and arrogant generic term ‘Mrs Miggins’ – very few people working in the firms have had any contact with private individuals at all. Most firms manage much more institutional money than retail, so they spend much of their time operating in a rarefied atmosphere occupied by pensions fund consultants and group scheme trustees. And of course even in the retail market the very large majority of relationships with end clients are intermediated – it isn't actually necessary to meet Mrs Miggins, Mr Miggins or any other members of the Miggins family.

A few consulting firms have done good business trying to narrow the gulf that exists between people working in firms like these, and the millions of Mrs Migginses whose money they're actually managing. Brilliant innovation agency WhatIf? have a wonderful habit of taking very senior financial services clients a million miles out of their comfort zones, for example – there's a story which we fear may be an urban myth, although we'd love it to be true, that they once organised a meeting of a big bank's main Board in a social housing flat at the top of a tower block, where no room was big enough to accommodate them all so half sat in the lounge and the other half sat on the bed. For most, this was no doubt the first and last experience of ever visiting a place like this. It would be nice to think it left a lasting mark.

By contrast, whenever one of your authors is addressing groups of financial services executives on any subject to do with investment for people who are not affluent and who are not at all engaged with investing (a surprisingly common conference theme these days), he always starts by asking how many of those present have a Hargreaves Lansdown account. The answer is pretty much never fewer than half. ‘There’s your problem right there', he tells them. ‘Not a single member of your target audience has ever heard of Hargreaves Lansdown, and not a single one would have the faintest idea what to do with their website if they ever stumbled upon it. Now, what was it you wanted to sell them?’

This is, of course, a single example of a much bigger and broader problem: the breadth of nthe gap that exists between most senior people in most financial srvices firms, and most of the people they have, or want to have, as their customers.

The simple fact is that it's infinitely much easier to be good at dealing with customers, and having real insight into their wants and needs, if you personally (or, if not you personally, then a fair proportion of your colleagues) aren't so very different from them. But while the financial services industry doesn't do too badly on issues of diversity overall, it still doers dreadfully badly at senior, decision-making levels. Check out the Business Class lounges, for example, at Heathrow and Edinburgh airports on Monday mornings and Friday evenings, when the great and the good from the financial services industries of both cities fly home for the weekend or to the office for the week. We're not quite 100% male, pale and stale – a few may be under 40, a very few may be women and a very few indeed may be people of colour. But do we⁵ reflect anything remotely like the diversity of the people we want to do business with? Do we hell?

Of course this sort of gulf is far narrower in other sectors, and in a few it doesn't exist at all. Marketing people are at an enormous advantage when not only they themselves, but also their colleagues across their firms' management teams, have a strong affinity with their customers.

To sum up, we're arguing that a strong, clear and distinctive sense of purpose is an essential attribute for any organisation that aims to be a leader in the new financial services marketing. This sense of purpose may work at one, or potentially both, of two levels:

• It may be so powerful that it genuinely does act as a high-level navigational system for the whole organisation.
• But even if it doesn't, it will still say something important and valuable about the people the organisation intends to serve, and what it is that the organisation intends to do for them.

Either way, provided that the company is willing to live it in both good times and bad, it provides marketers with a starting-point to do some great work.

It seems clear to us that finding a clear focus for a corporate purpose gets harder and harder the bigger, more complex and older an organisation gets (and it's even worse if the organisation is mired in scandal and misbehaviour and can say virtually nothing without risking snorts of derision). Vice versa, we think it's highly probable that the clearest purposes will be owned by smaller, more focused, younger businesses that haven't become mired in scandal.

This point has obvious and important implications for organisational strategy, to which we shall return further on in the book and particularly in the chapter on branding.