In recent years, we've been pleased to see the gap slowly narrow between the world of financial services marketing, and the broader consumer marketing economy.

Once upon a time, the financial service world was not far from literally a different planet, populated by a different species and governed by different rules. As we mentioned a couple of hundred pages back, for example, some 50 years or so ago the advertising accounts of all the country's biggest banks were handled by the same agency (an agency, by the way, that handled financial accounts only), and by gentlemen's agreement the banks declined to make use of expensive television advertising as a form of competition. More recently, though, perhaps over 20 years or so, this other planet has been moving steadily closer to planet earth – a process clearly visible in the evolving career paths of many of the marketing professionals involved.

In the first stage of these journeys, a view spread across the financial services industry that it had much to learn from people involved in marketing fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG).¹ There was a time when anyone with a few years' brand management experience at Procters, Unilever or Diageo could expect to double their salary by moving into FS. This first surge of incomers didn't achieve very much, except to get approval for huge uplifts in advertising budgets that contributed enormously to ad agencies' income, profits and bonus pools.

You could write a book (well, a short one) about why most of these FMCG specialists failed in financial services, probably the single most important reason being that service businesses are so much more complex and multi-dimensional than products in packets, cans and bottles. But the key take-out is that few of them lasted long.

The next wave of incomers had more relevant qualifications, because they came from other sectors of the service economy. Around the turn of the millennium, the industry view changed: now the idea was that on second thoughts it didn't have all that much to learn from FMCG marketing, but it did have a great deal to learn from other service-sector businesses and especially from retailing. Anyone with a few years' brand management experience at an airline, a telecoms firm or, even better, a major supermarket could expect to double their salary by moving into FS. (They might well be able to make the move without actually moving, of course. At about the same time, most major supermarket firms and a lot of other service-sector businesses started to take steps, with varying degrees of ambition, into financial services.)

The people arriving in this wave were generally a lot more effective than the FMCG people had been, and they introduced many of the service marketing concepts that are still central in financial services today. Perhaps foremost among these is the crucial – although still difficult – idea of managing the customer experience, which connects directly to the idea that service brands are principally experiential and depend more than anything on the distinctive and coherent management of what is usually a large number and wide range of touch points between firms and their customers.

Some service marketing principles proved harder to import than others. Severe limitations in data and IT, for example, often resulted in insuperable difficulties in introducing expensive and elaborate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. At the time when spending on these was at its peak, few large institutions even knew how many customers they had or what combinations of products they held, so the idea of managing the relationship with them was, in hindsight, absurdly ambitious, and vast amounts of money were wasted. It's also arguable that some of the individuals who joined from other service sectors failed to recognise how retailing financial services is different from retailing groceries: many believe that some of the more extreme risks run by certain institutions in the run-up to the 2008 crisis resulted from rash decisions taken by executives promoted into general management from backgrounds in retail marketing, with little experience or understanding of how catastrophically the climate can change in the financial world. But be that as it may, on the whole the service sector incomers can be judged a success.

Which may very likely help to explain why the next phase of recruitment activity, overlapping with this one, saw the tide begin to flow in the opposite direction. Increasingly, individuals who had built reputations for marketing success in financial services started coming to the attention of headhunters looking to fill vacancies in other sectors. Where once the route into financial services had been largely a one-way street, it was now becoming a dual carriageway. Some well-known and senior figures made the two-way trip more than once. Mike Hoban, one of the country's ablest senior marketers, came into the financial sector to take the top marketing role at Scottish Widows, left for Vodafone, returned for Confused.com and left again for Thomas Cook. At the time of writing, he's in charge of marketing at supermarket brand Morrisons.

This kind of ebb and flow has been a positive development, and we'd like to see a lot more of it. So far, it's a good deal more common among the biggest, most mass-market financial services firms such as banks, direct insurers and price comparison sites: examples are much fewer in fields such as asset management and financial advice. But over time, it can only help to create a situation in which that chasm that still exists between financial services and the rest of the consumer economy narrows to the point that it disappears.

Hang on a minute. Is chasm a bit strong? Fair enough, perhaps, if you compare the most marketing-oriented FMCG sectors with the least marketing-oriented corners of financial services. But look at what you might call the retailiest financial sectors – motor insurance, or credit cards, or online banking – and is the gap really so wide?

As we've said right from the outset, you can certainly find financial services brands that are very good at marketing. We trace the growth of marketing enlightenment back to the launch of Direct Line as long ago as 1985. But judging the category on the basis of its best examples is as misleading as judging it on the basis of its worst. Beyond the world of financial services, in the broader service economy as well as in consumer goods, marketers still routinely deploy strategies and tactics that are still largely unknown to us.

Here are seven marketing techniques that we think could be applied much more often in financial services.

1. The whole toolkit of promotional marketing. Offers of any kind are rare in financial services. In some other sectors, they're almost universal: has anyone ever bought a Charles Tyrwhitt shirt or a DFS sofa at its alleged full price? Taken to this extreme, offers can be wearying for consumers and potentially counterproductive for providers, but financial services has a long way to go before these problems will need worrying about. Currently HSBC stands out as the only big bank – and, as far as we can recall, the only big institution – that runs sale promotions from time to time, offering modest discounts on personal loans. Otherwise it's hard to call much financial promotional marketing to mind at all.
2. Believe it or not, outside financial services many other service businesses offer customers real and valuable loyalty bonuses. In the financial world the normal response when faced with unusually loyal customers is to fleece them with an endless series of ever-more extortionate price rises until eventually they realise they're being swindled and leave in a fury vowing never to return. (Ideally, of course, if they're older people and don't entirely understand the rules by which the game is played these days, they never notice and you can carry on profiteering at their expense until they expire.)

   It's instructive to compare this disgraceful behaviour with the kind of approaches taken by airlines seeking to maintain relationships with their most loyal customers. And increasingly, these days, this isn't just about high-margin business class customers. Even a budget airline like easyJet offers its valuable Flight Club package to frequent flyers, keeping them out of the hands of the likes of Ryanair.

3. Most marketing in financial services differs from most marketing outside financial services in its focus on corporate brands, and its lack of focus on product brands. As we discussed in our chapter on branding, there's nothing wrong with a strong corporate brand, and there are hundreds of examples outside the financial world. But trying to operate a consumer-facing marketing business without product brands is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back, and it's very odd that this is overwhelmingly what the financial services industry chooses to do. Thirty years or so ago some high-profile but rather half-baked financial product brands crashed and burned a bit too visibly: HSBC (then still Midland Bank) was the highest-profile example, with brands such as Vector, Orchard and Meridian. Expensive failures like these seem to have cast long shadows.
4. It may be a smaller opportunity than the first three, but ever since the first Apple store launched in London back in 2004, one of your authors has been intrigued by the possibilities in the idea of Apple-store-style flagship stores for financial services firms. We can't see much future for all those thousands of bog-standard High Street branches (although see point 7 below), but especially for big banks with wide product ranges the potential of a few truly spectacular flagship stores is tremendously exciting. It would be wonderful to have the space to be able to explore the things people can do with their money, and to design really spectacular exhibits bringing financial ideas to life. (The principle of compound interest makes a dreadfully boring bar chart, but could come to life in a brilliant virtual reality sequence.)
5. That kind of retail experience would demand a lot of great design, and in fact design is another area where financial services marketers still have much to learn from the bigger, broader marketing economy. Apple is again the obvious role model, but not the only one. Over the years, dozens of brands in different categories have stood out for design excellence – upmarket ones like Bang & Olufsen, Aston Martin and Mont Blanc, through to middle- or mass-market ones like Sony, Pizza Express and Ikea. In financial services, it's not possible to think of any firms that have consistently sought to differentiate themselves in this way. This is odd, because it's a particularly painless and low-risk kind of differentiation that doesn't cost much and won't raise any hackles in compliance.
6. The other side of the same beautifully designed coin is tone of voice. For many, many years no-one in financial services seemed to care about this at all. More recently, things have changed – but not really in a good way. Now, every copywriter working in the financial world is sick to the back teeth of being asked to write web copy or product brochures or tweets or whatever ‘in the style of that lovely, quirky Innocent Smoothies packaging’. And when we've done so, we're even sicker, maybe to the front teeth, of being asked to tone it down a bit because maybe it's a bit too chatty for a serious subject like money. Actually, it would be best if you toned it down quite a lot. In fact, on second thoughts maybe you could tone it down completely and just make it sound like everyone else's. There isn't a single brand in financial services that consistently achieves a distinctive tone of voice, and this kind of muddle-headedness is why.
7. And finally, going back to a point we made in our chapter about engagement, wouldn't it be a good idea for more firms to try to start building some kind of relationships with their future customers years ahead of time – in other words, to make a start way back in the pocket money years? NatWest deserve some credit for its investment in financial education in schools, which is a good effort though deeply dull. But surely there's more that other firms could do? Ikea stores provide children's playgrounds, complete with particularly impressive ball ponds, and roundabouts and candyfloss stalls outside the main entrance. Perhaps there's a future here for all those redundant High Street branches – turn them into giant ball ponds and give the kids some fun while the parents are shopping.

If you work in marketing outside financial services – or if you're one of the few people in financial services who looks beyond the sector – these areas of marketing opportunity may seem familiar and hardly original. If so, good for you. But there are still financial services marketers, including some very senior ones, who scarcely know that any of these options exist.

This isn't just a point about learning from other sectors' best-practice marketing techniques. It's a more fundamental point, about the world that our customers live in and the context in which they understand and experience what we do.

Everyone in marketing knows at least one anecdote making the point that any product's competitors are more diverse and more numerous than you think. One of your authors remembers working on the huge Mars confectionery account, long before he discovered the subtle joys of financial services. His agency was invited to pitch for the seriously mis-branded French Golden Delicious apples account (yes to French, not really to Golden and absolutely not at all to Delicious: one out of three ain't bad), and out of politeness asked its biggest client for permission to proceed. To the agency's dismay, Mars wasn't having it. In Mars' view, the French apple-growers were a direct competitor. The Mars people made their position clear with the undeniable soundbite: ‘Gentlemen, we are both in the anytime foods business’.

There are more extreme versions of the same issue. An agency working for a leading fragrance brand was prevented from pitching for an alcoholic drinks account on the grounds that both competed in the Christmas gifts market.

Most financial services firms, though, define their competitors extraordinarily narrowly. Pension providers benchmark themselves against other pension providers, asset managers against other asset managers, mortgage lenders against mortgage lenders – and actually it can be even narrower. Mortgage lenders who specialise in buy-to-let loans are really only interested in what other buy-to-let lenders are up to. Those lending to first-time home buyers are tracked much less closely.

But this isn't really the way it seems to consumers. Mars' concern about conflict of interest is nonsense, of course, but actually they're right as far as the underlying issue is concerned: a person feeling peckish may well weigh up the pros and cons of an apple and a chocolate bar, or indeed may decide to buy a coffee instead.

Pension providers may think they're in competition with other pension providers, but most of the time they aren't, at least as far as end-consumers are concerned. Consumers very rarely weigh up the competing propositions of numbers of different pension providers. In any case, if it's a workplace scheme, the choice is likely to be limited to the provider chosen by the employer. But there is a competitor set all the same. The competitor set consists of all the other things the individual could do with the money. A contribution increase of 3% per annum would pay for a Sky Sports subscription, a week's family holiday, a year's services for the car, pretty much all that year's school clothes for the kids or a new iPhone X. There's a good case to be made for putting money into pensions, even against a competitor set as tough as this. But you're unlikely to make that case as powerfully as you might if you don't even realise who the competitors are.

Sometimes, even today, the situation is actually even worse than this. Far too many people in financial services still believe that their offerings occupy some kind of moral high ground, that it is in some kind of objective way better for consumers to put their money into their products and services than into any of their other available choices. We said earlier that life assurance people are particularly prone to this: many believe that life assurance is such an unquestionable good that the case should be made for it not by firms with policies to sell, but by the Government, through a public awareness campaign, in the national interest. But life assurance people are not alone in this foolishness and arrogance. Pensions people are just as bad. According to them, the risk of poverty in old age is so serious that people should be discouraged from almost any other non-essential expenditure until their pensions are funded to the max.

There might be a little bit of sense in this if all those other expenditures clamouring for the same available money were pointless and trivial. But in real life, for most people, very few of them are. Which is more important, increasing your pension contributions or getting the car serviced?

This is not to say that it's impossible, or inappropriate, to promote higher pension contributions. Putting money into pensions, just like buying life assurance, is a good thing to do. But to be able to make that case effectively – to be able to express it in terms that make sense to consumers, and to offer them ways of increasing the contributions that they find engaging and manageable – we have to be able to see our world through our customers' eyes, and to understand how our propositions appear to them among all the others demanding their attention.

Frankly, we're not very good at this, mainly because until recently we didn't have to be. When we could rely on face-to-face salespeople bringing in most of our customers, the ability to see our world through our customers' eyes wasn't important. Now it's increasingly vital, and we need to get better at it fast.

On the upside, at least there are some big, deep, exciting consumer thoughts, feeling and behaviours for us to involve ourselves with. Most people working in marketing deal with haircare, or footwear, or readymade meals, or mobile phone services. Weirdly, a great many of them think that what we do is boring. How wrong can they be?

Money is potent stuff – perhaps, indeed, it's the most potent stuff. People dream about money, think about money, talk about money, worry about money, plan for money, hope for money, work for money, even kill for money. (How much of that can you say about haircare products?) Our job in financial services marketing is to understand those hopes, fears, dreams, needs and plans, and to find ways of making strong, real connections between them and the products and services our firms have to offer.

These thoughts bring us finally, and perhaps inevitably, up against the form of words in the subtitle of this book: Why financial services needs a new kind of marketing. What is this new kind of marketing, you've been wondering ever since you saw the book's title. When will they tell us what it is? Looking at the few pages remaining unread to the right-hand side of the book's spine, you conclude that this new kind must be remarkably brief to describe.

The truth is that for the most part, the ‘new’ kind of marketing we're calling for is no more and no less than what we've also called ‘good’ marketing. As we said at the outset, hitherto the financial services industry has been able to make a great deal of money out of a great many customers without much need for marketing at all, and much of what there has been has been unfair and exploitative. But the tide has now turned. Tighter regulation, growing consumer scepticism and, perhaps most of all, the ever-increasing power of the Internet are combining to bring this era to an end.

It may be, when the history comes to be written, that the great Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) debacle appears to be the turning point. The lending industry saw an opportunity to increase its profits by tens of billions of pounds by means of an unfair and exploitative marketing practice, charging customers preposterous sums for a shockingly poor-value product that in many cases they didn't even know they were buying. For some years they got away with it. But in the end, the environment changed too much for the scam to be sustainable. Regulation, distrustful consumers, social media and, it must be said, a large horde of deeply dislikeable claims management companies turned the tide, and ultimately the industry has had to pay its customers some £40 billion in compensation – probably an even larger amount than the profits it had previously banked. At the time of writing, there are still plenty of similarly bad practices going on across the industry, but we don't think there are any on quite this scale – and, touch wood, we don't think there will be again.

Increasingly, our ‘new’ kind of financial services marketing turns out to be exactly and precisely the kind of marketing that we discussed in Chapter 2, when we quoted the definition offered by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.

We remain convinced by the case that we made at the outset, that this definition fits just as well with financial services as it does with any other sector of the consumer economy. Fundamentally, we say that good marketing is good marketing, whatever the product or service.

But there is one significant difference. While we accept that surprisingly deep insights can be found in exploring the ways that consumers interact with all sorts of superficially mundane products – some brilliant work has been done on the emotional dimensions informing people's choices of washing powder – it still seems clear to us that it's an immense privilege to deal with a subject as emotive, as meaningful, as resonant and quite simply as important as money.

As the rapidly advancing field of behavioural science has shown so clearly in recent years, there is a massive and still largely uncharted continent of thoughts, feelings, needs, emotions and behaviours for us to explore. And on the basis of our discoveries we can go on to ‘satisfy’ those ‘customer requirements’ infinitely much better than anything or anyone who has gone before us.

Early in our careers, your authors both stumbled into financial services marketing, much more by accident than design. But we stayed here by choice, and for one principal reason: we both had a challenging and exciting sense that here was a field where very little of the great work had yet been done.

Quite a few years later, a bit more of it has been done. But the great majority still waits to be accomplished.