Considering how long it is since either of your authors could be said to have had young children, the memories are remarkably fresh: those distant days when we were actually better at football than our sons; when if you wanted to talk about something that wasn't for their ears all you had to do was spell, not say, the key words; when £1 a week was more than enough pocket money.

Not many of our memories of our children in those days are to do with brands and marketing, and even fewer are to do with financial services. But some are. For people with our particular professional interests, one unexpectedly fascinating and thought-provoking experience, back in those early years, was to see awareness and perceptions of brands form in their minds – and not just brands intended for young children like Haribo and Nickelodeon, but a lot of remarkably grownup brands too.

Of course the brands that made the biggest impact soonest were the ones that, in one way or another, were personally relevant to them. We'd like to make it clear for the record that neither of our families were frequent visitors to McDonald's, but Chloe, Sarah, Felix, James and Oliver could all spot those golden arches at a range of half a mile or more by the age of three. But there were others where, even though the relevance was marginal, awareness was still strong. By the time they were a little older – maybe 5 – they could have recognised airline liveries, particularly BA and easyJet. And they could probably have distinguished between the main automotive brands appealing to middle-class marketers' families like ours (BMW, Audi, Mercedes and more or less anything else German) by the same age too.

It wasn't simply a question of basic brand recognition. While still very young – maybe not five, but not a lot more – they could have expressed some remarkably sophisticated brand perceptions. They'd have understood, for example, that BA and easyJet occupied different spaces in the airline market. Or that Waitrose is posher than Asda. Or that Apple is cooler than Microsoft. Or (probably) that The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Sun are intended for different readers.

A lot of these perceptions were simply copied from their parents, of course. Others were copied from their peer group, and to some extent from advertising and other marketing communications. Many resulted from a combination of these influences.

But whatever the inputs, it seemed pretty clear to us then – and we've seen no reason to change our view since – that very large chunks of their own individual brand landscapes had formed in their minds by the time they were 7 or 8 or so, and the whole brand atlas was largely laid out before them by the time they reached their teens.

With the exception – yes, there is some kind of point to these reminiscences – of one dark continent, one land-mass that remained still very largely cloud-covered and undefined. This was of course the territory headed ‘financial services’. By the age of, say, 12 or 13, they still knew next to nothing about this.

To be fair, it was ‘next to’ rather than ‘nothing’. The occasional stretch of visible shoreline could be glimpsed through the clouds. Heaven knows why, for example, but Lucian's children Chloe and Oliver paid fascinated attention to a truly terrible TV commercial for direct lender Lombard Direct, whose media strategy seemed to skew heavily toward children's cable channels presumably much watched by cash-strapped parents. As a result, twenty years later, Chloe and Oliver can still recite every word of the voiceover: ‘Want a low-cost loan at your convenience? Call Lombard Direct on 0800 2 15000. Our rates reflect your circumstances, and our typical APR is just 7.4% …’

Of course they didn't have the faintest idea what any of this meant, and still don't now (‘Our rates reflect your circumstances’?). But that's not unusual when it comes to things that children learn by heart – an APR of 7.4% is probably no more obscure than a quinquireme of Nineveh. And even today, 20 years later, if they did want a low-cost loan at their convenience, it's more than likely that Lombard Direct would get the call.

Several points arise from these reminiscences:

1. First and foremost, of course, they tell us that perceptions of financial services and financial services brands are late to form in children's minds. They're not unique in this, of course: at the same ages, the children probably knew little about professional services firms, the chateaux of Bordeaux or manufacturers of gardening tools. But on the basis of Aristotle's famous ‘Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man’, you wonder whether financial services, coming so late into the picture, ever really catch up.¹
2. They say something about the sheer lack of salience of financial services in day-to-day life. Many of the sectors that the children did learn about made themselves known in random and happenstance ways – they chanced frequently on ads, or passed particular retailers on the way to school. In financial services, this doesn't happen often (how many ads for asset managers do you chance upon?) and when it does, it's simply not interesting enough to be memorable (is there anything more boring to look at than the outside of a bank branch, except perhaps the inside?).
3. Similarly, they tell us that parents don't talk much about financial matters, or financial brands – at least, not in front of the children. Maybe some parents do. But even though both fathers were running financial services marketing agencies at the time, we didn't.
4. And finally they tell us that few if any financial services providers have much interest in building initial awareness among children. Some years before our children were born, NatWest was something of an exception, at least for a while: people older than our children have hazy memories of a collectible series of NatWest piggy banks (even today, you occasionally see faded examples at car boot sales). But they're long gone now.

In short, by the time they had reached their teens, the implicit message that Chloe, Sarah, Felix, James and Ollie had received, at some level, was that financial services is a boring, recessive, not-very-relevant part of life, offering very little in the way of interest to them (except for that stupid blue Lombard Direct telephone). We can't prove the extent to which these early perceptions have shaped the way they think and feel on the subject today. But, let's be honest, although they have built up a bit more knowledge, understanding and of course engagement over the years, their current perceptions of the financial world aren't so very different.

All of which goes to introduce the topic of this chapter: that in the light of most people's low level of engagement with financial services marketing and brands, by far the biggest challenge for most financial services marketers is winning from their target markets any or all of their attention, interest, desire or action (the famous ‘AIDA’ mnemonic that's been said ever since the late 19^th century to summarise how people engage with brands).

Or to put it another, simpler way, by far the greatest danger is the danger of being ignored.

That is of course a huge generalisation, and there are at least two important caveats. For one thing, the scale of the danger varies greatly depending on your target market. We must again remember the existence of that small segment of highly-engaged consumers – we tend to refer to them as ‘hobbyists’ – who come to your marketing activities with a hugely much higher level of engagement from the outset. These people present their own problems – they are often price-sensitive, challenging and disloyal – but they are very much less likely to ignore you.

And for another thing, the scale of the danger also depends on the extent to which firms are able to deliver relevant propositions at relevant moments in time. An individual who cares nothing about motor insurance for 364 days a year may feel very differently on the day that he or she receives a renewal notice.

But even so, there are a bunch of reasons why a great many people are strongly predisposed to ignore a great many financial services marketing initiatives. The six more important reasons are:

1. They don't have strong connections with financial services brands. There are very few financial services providers people feel positively predisposed toward. People queue up overnight outside Apple stores waiting for new iPhones to be launched: it's difficult to imagine even loyal customers doing the same for new HSBC ISAs.
2. This lack of predisposition also reflects the extraordinarily overcrowding that still exists in many sectors. There are literally hundreds of asset managers, thousands of advice firms, scores of motor insurers. It's difficult for any but the most engaged consumers to identify any particular presence amidst such a dense throng.
3. Whatever it is that we're saying or doing, many consumers will tend to assume on the basis of their past experience that it's likely to be hard to understand and not very relevant.²
4. Especially when it comes to communications, the requirements of the compliance process don't help. Consumers recognise that most activity pointed toward them is sure to be so hedged around with small print, warnings and generic messages required by the regulator that it's bound to be heavy going.
5. If it's a communication from one of our own providers, it is of course quite likely to be bad news. It could be very bad news, for example that we've done something bad and got into serious trouble – or just slightly bad news, for example that savings rates have gone down again.
6. And then of course last but absolutely by no means least, it's almost certain to be very boring. Can you think of a single financial services provider we can reasonably expect to approach us in any kind of interesting, enjoyable, rewarding or distinctive way?

What we're saying, in short, is that people have quite a number of very good reasons for ignoring things that we want to say to them, or show them, or ask them. And whatever it is that we're wanting to do, if they ignore us then we can't succeed in any of our aims.

And yet it seems to us that very few marketers in the industry worry anything like as much as they should about this danger. They worry about lots of other things – first and foremost about arousing the ire of the regulator, and to some extent about expressing themselves clearly, and to a considerable extent about managing the customer journey in which this activity, whatever it is, plays a part – but hardly ever about falling at the first fence and simply failing to earn any attention.

Which is odd, because when you look at the available metrics that measure attention, they're generally dire. Open rates for e-mails are sinking steadily down toward response levels for conventional mail. Most measurable forms of content marketing deliver pitiful results (check out the average asset manager's YouTube views). Awareness of print advertising is miserably low. Organisations spending fortunes on awareness-building are delighted if awareness improves by a handful of percentage points. In a long-established syndicated tracking study among so-called active private investors, asset management brands outside the top half-dozen or so achieve between 1% and 0% (spontaneous) awareness.

And of course if we take a step back from individual brands and specific campaigns and activities, we find that average levels of comprehension and involvement remain as low as ever. When you consider how much consumers have learned over 10 or 20 years in a field like IT – where 20 years ago most of us knew nothing at all – it's quite startling how little they've learned about financial services.

In our list of reasons for most consumers' lack of engagement with financial services marketing, there's one notable omission: we don't say anything about a lack of involvement in, or concern about, the subject of money itself. That's for the obvious reason that it would be completely wrong to do so. Money is a huge thing for people. Along with health and relationships, it's one of the three biggest things there is. Every year, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) carries out research among a large and nationally representative sample, to see what's on the minds of people in the UK. Some topics come and go. But there are three that, year in year out, come top of the list. They are, unsurprisingly, money, health and relationships.

One of your authors remembers a conversation with a client who was a marketing manager at a health insurer specialising in family health plans. The client grumbled about the tedium of his job. People don't care about family health plans, he said. If only he could get a job marketing something interesting – a food brand, maybe, or a drink, or even something in toiletries. Since he was a client, your author probably politely resisted the temptation to tell him about the ONS research. But the fact is, contrary to his perception, the client quite literally couldn't be marketing anything more interesting to people.

But, as ever, perception matters more than reality. The client believed he was dealing with something dreadfully boring. And of course, as soon as you believe that, you are. The comms we produced for his company were as dull as anything we ever did. He wouldn't have it any other way.

Which is exactly why this curious paradox persists: that consumers who think of money as one of the most important and involving things in their lives think of our marketing activities as one of the least important and involving. It's not money that bores them witless, it's us.³

To be fair, it's not just us. There are others in the financial services world who are no better than marketers at connecting with all those concerns, and fears, and hopes, and dreams, and passions that money arouses in people. With a few honourable exceptions, another group who've done at least as badly, and maybe even a bit worse, are the journalists who are responsible for all that dreary personal finance coverage in the media (which, research tells us, is typically ignored by over 90% of the paper's readers).

Again, that small group of highly-engaged hobbyists are wonderfully well served. In print and online, there are almost infinite amounts of content to feed their interest and slake their thirst for news and novelty. But for the other 40-odd million of us, it's a different story. Personal finance sections, on the whole, are still predicated on the principle of providing an environment in which asset managers can be persuaded to advertise their investment funds, and as a result most of the editorial is narrow, dull and repetitive – endless features on choosing an ISA, and which investment sectors offer the best prospect of growth.

Reading this tedious stuff, you'd never guess that money, the ultimate subject matter of these pages, arguably arouses stronger emotions, more anxiety, more excitement, more argument and more drama than anything else in life. Personal finance journalism sucks all the life and interest out of it, and presents it in copy that's little more than one level up from the terms and conditions in a unit trust brochure. You could hardly make money seem duller.

There is a small handful of livelier options. The BBC's long-running Radio 4 personal finance programme, Moneybox, is stodgy and old-fashioned, but it still manages to convey a slight sense that it's dealing with a subject people actually care about. And coming at money from a very different angle, Martin Lewis's online Money Saving Expert brand recognises that everyone likes a deal, and therefore that pointing us at wherever the best deals are to be found right now is a helpful thing to do.

As for our most powerful medium, still television, it has never managed to rise to the challenge. Half-baked shows trying and failing to make personal finance accessible turn up on Channel 5 every couple of years, but few last longer than one series. It is literally impossible to remember anything good about money on television.⁴

As with so many other weaker aspects of financial services marketing, it wasn't so long ago that none of this mattered very much. There were few editorial environments beyond personal finance sections of newspapers and a few specialist personal finance magazines, and all of these were no more and no less than a marketplace where hobbyist investors could respond to ads for unit trusts. No-one else was really expected to read them, and since their main purpose was to provide an environment for the advertising it didn't really matter what the editorial said (although if it said positive things about the funds being advertised, that was useful from the fund managers' perspective).

Things have changed. That traditional coupon-clipping unit trust investor segment has largely gone away, moving to online services like Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor, and in any case the regulator has tightened the rules on off-the-page advertising to the extent that even if the audience was still there, it's scarcely a cost-effective media approach any more.

But as ‘traditional’ personal finance media lost their established raison d'êetre, it seems to us that they failed to appreciate the emergence of a new one. The new marketing challenge that forms the subject of this book applies to media just as much as to any other marketing arena: in an era in which responsibility for financial security rests far more heavily upon individuals' shoulders than ever before, those individuals desperately need good, engaging, relevant marketing initiatives to help them discharge that responsibility.

This is not an easy challenge, but it's an important one. We still live in hope that online, offline and, in a perfect world, on mainstream television, a new kind of personal finance journalism will start to emerge that will connect in completely new ways with millions of people who've avoided the subject like the plague hitherto.

Meanwhile, the lack of attractive options helps to explain why, in recent years, financial services advertising and direct marketing spends have been falling. But in parallel to the budget cuts among established players, there's another trend that may turn out to be more significant (and that's ‘significant’ in the sense of ‘problematic’) – the number of new players, spread across a number of emerging financial categories, that are aiming to succeed with little or no advertising at all.

We're thinking here of the crowd of young, startup digital players, in fields including investment, protection, aggregation, banking, peer-to-peer lending, insurance and others. Altogether, with some judicious Googling and reference back to the slides from recent conference presentations, we could easily come up with 100 names of young businesses eager to recruit customers (200 wouldn't be hard). And if we commissioned a big piece of awareness research across a nice big nationally representative sample, we're quite sure that no more than a handful of people would have ever heard of more than a handful of them.

At a certain level, anyone who ever launches anything and seeks to recruit new customers has to be an optimist. Somewhere in their minds, they have a picture of the front door of their offices the day after the launch announcement, where a queue of excited consumers is tailing back into the distance, as far as the eye can see, waiting eagerly for the opportunity to buy. If you didn't believe, at least at some level, that your new product or service was good enough to generate that kind of enthusiasm, you wouldn't really have any business launching it.

But at the moment, we have to say that nothing – absolutely nothing – is holding back the dramatic evolution of the retail financial services industry more than the belief, on the part of many of its most exciting and dynamic innovators, that they'll be able to recruit a customer base without spending any money. They won't. They'll just stumble along, serving customer bases of dozens or hundreds of people, until the Phase 2 funding runs out.

It must be a matter for regret that many brilliant and innovative ideas will never achieve what they might have achieved, even if cynics might say that the inability of many of these startup businesses to recruit more than a handful of customers isn't really a problem because it was never their intention to do so. The plan was always to demonstrate proof of concept, on the way to selling the startup business at a very large profit to a large, established player that would rather buy its innovations than build them for itself.

This cynical view is probably about half right (or, as the cynic would, say, half wrong). But the fact is, fame does still matter. John Duffield, founder and leader first of Jupiter's mutual fund business and then of his independent New Star business, spent more money on advertising than other asset managers 20 times his firms' size. He explained simply that if you want your firm to be disproportionately famous, which he did, you have to spend disproportionately more money to make it so.

Duffield was a hard taskmaster – his marketing and external agency people used to dread the lengthy coach tours in which they would join him on interminable inspections of his firms' outdoor advertising sites, and heaven help them if a poster was badly hung or not posted where it ought to be. But the high-cost, high-profile strategy worked, and New Star's brand awareness and fund sales among both private investors and intermediaries increased at a startling rate.

Perhaps a better-known hero among marketers is the veteran adman Dave Trott, who, while never particularly renowned for financial services campaigns, held a distinctly Duffield-like view about fame. Advertising, he said, is very expensive, and only a tiny fraction of it – say 1% – is noticed sufficiently to become the subject of conversation among people in pubs. It therefore follows that when you develop advertising, the only objective worth bothering with is making sure than your campaign falls into that 1%. If it doesn't, you're sure to be wasting a great deal of money. This is such a simple argument that you imagine there must be something wrong with it, but if so it's hard to pin down what it is.

Having considered various parts of the industry and drawn fairly downbeat conclusions, it's important to recognise that these are by no means the whole story. Arguably some of the things that we're castigating established and new players alike for doing (or indeed not doing) are practices of the old financial services marketing, now being visibly and happily overtaken by the new.

Of these, the most important and encouraging is the huge technology-driven shift in the basis of financial services marketing that's currently in progress, and which we discuss in several places in this book (and particularly in the chapter on data and data-driven marketing). As it becomes possible to interact effectively with individual customers on a one-to-one basis, much of this noisy broadcast activity starts to feel seriously out of date. If we can talk with 10 million customers individually for about the same cost that we can shout at them all at once, isn't it much better to do so?

Without repeating too much of that previous chapter, we think it's both/and rather than either/or. It is a wonderful thing to be able to base the marketing mix on real, detailed knowledge of the individual, rather than just generalised insight into a segment. If that means that the particular patterns of interactions between individuals and providers are, cumulatively, unique – if no one customer's journey, over time, is exactly the same as any other's – we will truly have moved into a very different world.

But of course, the huge majority of the components of those unique journeys won't be unique at all – or, even if they are, they'll only be unique in terms of superficial personalisation. It's great if your educational ISA video addresses you by name, and focuses on an investment that matches your known risk profile. Being addressed by name may attract and retain your interest for a few moments, at least until the novelty of such things wears off. But if the video is boring and incomprehensible, we won't be much further forward.

In short, we're unconvinced by the current belief that data-driven personalisation will, in itself, solve the problem of engagement. It can certainly help. But personalised content isn't automatically engaging, and particularly not when it falls under the influence of managers with quite different agendas in mind. We've seen examples of highly personalised new pension statements, for example, which have been developed with the single-minded intention of encouraging customers to increase their level of contributions. The graphs and charts are all about the individual recipient. But the overall effect is far from engaging: we strongly suspect that most customers will recoil from such transparently manipulative communications.

And of course returning for a moment to that swarm of wannabe disruptive digital startups, it's important to recognise that for as long as they don't have any customers, their ability to personalise their activities is limited. Some show signs of understanding the weakness of their position, and spend time, effort and even in some cases money on building a prospect database that includes some real insights into individual circumstances, wants and needs: the challenger bank Monzo, for example, had built a prospect base of over 150,000 people before it opened its doors. But with so many newcomers heading for different segments of the market, it's simply not possible for all of them to follow this example.

No, even making every allowance for the still-emerging power of digital to interact with consumers in new ways, we can see no alternative: getting better at financial services marketing has to involve getting much, much better at being interesting.

Most of us have, somewhere around the intersection of our conscious and unconscious minds, a brutally simple test for interestingness: within seconds of encountering a thing, from a leaflet to a TV programme to a website to a phone call, we can decide whether it's interesting enough to keep our attention. It's true that there are lots of different ways it can be interesting. YouTube cat videos are interesting in a very different way from a bank statement showing that we have rather more (or indeed rather less) money than we thought we had. There is no single way to achieve interestingness.⁵

But, even so, the essential point is that most of the ways that we try to interest people in financial services are miserable failures. At the moment, for example, a direct marketing communication of any sort that generates a sale from two out of a hundred people is hailed as a great success. This is massively wasteful for the industry, and bad for consumers too. Moving the whole question of engagement right up to the top of our agenda, and using every single technique we can think of to address it, we have to start doing much better.