If you're one of that significant minority who still thinks that ‘marketing’ is the same thing as ‘marketing communications’, then this is the chapter you've been waiting for. This chapter discusses some aspects of what marketing communications will look like in the new financial marketing era.

In three bullet points, the answer is that overall, compared to how things have been previously, they will be a whole lot more:

• Measurable (and measured);
• Multilayered;
• Concerned with engagement.

Or in one bullet point, having responsibility for them will be a whole lot more:

• Complicated.

The short answer to the question in the chapter's headline is ‘Yes.’

Like much in this book, these are of course generalisations. Some financial services marketing communications (do you mind if for the purposes of this chapter we call them FS marcomms?) have been measurable, and/or multilayered, and/or concerned with engagement for many years. If we pick out the firm that, in our view, would walk away with the FS Marcomms 30-Year Consistent Excellence Award, the direct-to-consumer insurer Direct Line, we'd argue that give or take the odd lapse in the middle of the period, it has fairly consistently been all three:

1. As a ‘brand response’ communicator dependent on direct-to-consumer marcomms for the great majority of its business, all of its comms activities have always been measurable (and measured);
2. By the same token, as a very large player in its sector with a large existing customer base and steep annual acquisition targets, Direct Line has always integrated a complex, multilayered programme extending from heavy TV advertising at the broadest, acquisition-driven end of the spectrum through to well-integrated customer comms by mail and increasingly digitally at the other;
3. In an increasingly crowded category, and dealing with a low-interest purchase, Direct Line has always placed at least a reasonable amount of emphasis on the need for communications to engage. The red telephone became a highly successful (and, in the industry, much-envied) brand icon: how many times, in their agency days, were your authors briefed to come up with ‘a property like Direct Line’s red telephone'?¹

But if Direct Line ticks all three of our boxes, there are plenty of examples of firms that ticked two, one or indeed none at all.

In hindsight, as financial advertising levels increased steadily in the pre-internet years up to the turn of the millennium, the lack of integration was a particular weakness. A number of organisations explicitly adopted a dis-integrated approach, with entirely separate strands of advertising intended to build corporate brands and to promote products (the two often shorthanded mysteriously as ‘theme’ and ‘scheme’ advertising). Insofar as these separate streams were measured, they were measured separately too, typically with a tracking study to monitor brand perceptions and a separate, much harder set of direct marketing measures to monitor the performance of the product advertising.

In many organisations this bifurcation went even further, with separate external agencies and even separate internal teams responsible for the two strands, At worst, this could lead to a good deal of negativity and hostility between the two - the direct marketing team perceiving their brand colleagues as fluffy, irresponsible wastrels spending huge amounts of the available budget on achieving small shifts in brand perception of dubious value, and the brand team thinking of their direct marketing colleagues as vandals and hooligans doing lasting damage to brand perceptions with tacky free-gift offers intended to achieve tiny improvements in cost-per-response rates.

Sadly, it's probably fair to say that some of that era's most admired and most fondly remembered brand campaigns, usually on television, were created in circumstances like these. Examples include Allied Dunbar's memorable ‘For The Life You Don't Yet Know’ campaign, Barclays' ‘Blade Runner’ films (directed by the great Ridley Scott shortly before he completed his journey from making commercials in the UK to making blockbusters in Hollywood), and even the most highly regarded of all financial services brand campaigns, Prudential's ‘Wannabe’ commercials.

These certainly didn't lack engagement, and as you can see if you search for them on You Tube are still charming and watchable today. It may very well be that the tracking studies showed improvements in perceptions of all the brands involved. But as largely unsupported TV advertising vehicles, not reflected in other advertising or communications in any other media – and long before the days of digital, so not possible to reflect on a website or other online comms – the TV campaigns stood alone, failing to cast much of a spell over any of the firms' other activities.

The rationale for this kind of activity was particularly difficult tom understand in the case of businesses which were wholly, or largely, intermediated, as for example Prudential was at that time. It's a matter of great regret to advertising agencies, including those managed by your authors in their time, that it has never been easy to demonstrate that consumer-facing brand advertising is an effective way to affect intermediated business levels. For every case study showing a correlation between heavy advertising and strong intermediated sales, there is another case study showing strong intermediated sales without any brand advertising at all.²

It's a pity that we can't look back on the era of the big unsupported brand campaigns with more enthusiasm, not only because some were very enjoyable to watch but also because they were a lot of fun to produce. Writing 60-second TV commercials and paying Ridley Scott a large amount of money to shoot them was an agreeable way to make a living, especially when you needed little more evidence to prove the success of what you were doing than, say, a 10% increase in a somewhat ill-defined consumer ‘brand salience’ score.

But these days, right across the whole of retail financial services, there are very, very few unsupported, stand-alone, big-budget, TV-based brand awareness advertising campaigns. In a sense, their disappearance reflects the macro-trend that forms the underlying theme of this book: financial services marketing today increasingly has far too much real work to do, far too many ways in which it needs to deliver real value to the consumer, to be able to afford such a very large chunk of the available budget on fun but not hugely meaningful ways of raising brand awareness.

As we shall see, this is certainly not to say that broadcast advertising addressing brand objectives is, or should be, a thing of the past. On the contrary, as we'll explain, we think there should be a good deal more of it. It's just that most financial services marketers would now agree that it's part of a story, part of a strategy, and despite its cost arguably a fairly small part. It's certainly not the whole bloody thing.

This chapter isn't intended as a practical guide to planning or producing marketing communications. That's a subject for a whole book in itself, and plenty already exist. Instead, it's more of a checklist of practices and principles, based on your authors' experience on client and agency side alike, which can help achieve good marcomms outcomes. Or, to put the same point the other way round, which can help avoid bad ones.

In no particular order, the following section presents our thoughts on the ways in which tomorrow's FS marcomms will be different from those of the past.

IT'S BROADCAST AND NARROWCAST, NOT OR

We certainly don't challenge the big idea – discussed in more detail in Chapter 13 – that the most important difference between the old financial services marketing and the new is today's focus on marketing to individuals rather than to groups.

We acknowledge that this huge change has been driven primarily by the growing power of technology, and its increasing ability to manage and manipulate the stupendous quantities of data that are required.

And we recognise that this change in focus has transformational consequences, requiring organisations – and not just marketers – to see their world fundamentally from a customer-centric perspective, rather than one that is based around products, services and channels.

But in Chapter 13 we do express one caveat that we want to revisit here. We think there are a whole bunch of reasons why it would be wrong to believe this development represents a binary change, in which after a transitional period an old way of doing business is replaced with a new one. On the contrary, we think:

• Individualised marketing and mass marketing aren't in any way binary opposites, but rather are points on a spectrum;
• Individualised marketing absolutely isn't new, and has represented a very significant part of all marketing activity for many years;
• Mass marketing, and its close relative niche marketing, aren't going away and will continue indefinitely to account for a large proportion of all marketing activity.

Let's consider some of the reasons for these points of view.

• To see how mass marketing and individual marketing are points on a spectrum, it's helpful to realise how comfortably – and how frequently – they combine. Say that a financial services provider develops a packaged, or bundled, product that individual customers can tailor to their own requirements, and which will engage with customers on an individualised basis. It might well make perfect sense to launch the product to the market via a single, mass-marketing, product-led campaign – and to present it in detail through a single, though customisable, website. And even when the product is successfully launched and has developed its own customer base, it might very likely still make sense to promote it on a broadcast basis.
• This is part of a bigger picture in which it's clearly necessary to maintain both customer-centric and product-centric views of the world, and to be able to switch seamlessly between the two. For startups, or young organisations with few customers, a customer-centric approach that relies on external data is likely to be an expensive way to acquire a customer base, and broadcast activity is likely to play a big role. Once an organisation has a number of customers (and, of course, a way of capturing and manipulating the necessary data), the balance shifts the other way.
• Although the quantity of data now available to us is far greater than ever before, as is our ability to slice it and dice it, we'd argue that ultimately the change is incremental, not fundamental. Individual customer and prospect data has been available in quantity for decades. Large parts of the direct marketing industry have taken an individual, customer-led approach, focusing on share of customer, cross-selling and upselling, for as long as we can remember.
• This isn't just about marketing. A surprisingly large number of other functions and disciplines in financial services have always taken a customer-centric view. What is underwriting, for example, if not a process designed to individualise a customer's insurance cover and premium? Or portfolio management, if not a process of personalising a customer's investments?
• Vice versa, at the same time the opposite is also true: especially for large organisations crippled by legacy systems and outdated organisational structures, the challenges involved in overlaying a new customer-centric approach are absolutely immense. For large, long-established, complex firms, moving to a position where they can take a customer-centric view of some customers some of the time isn't impossibly difficult. Moving to a situation when they can take this kind of view of all their customers all of the time is mind-blowingly hard.
• Although it's true that digital communications dramatically reduce some of the costs of communication with customers at an individual level (and ever-advancing machine learning capabilities will reduce costs a lot further), they often don't. Overall it will frequently be a lot more expensive (and a lot more complicated) to manage a business in this way: in ROI terms, taking both costs and outcomes into account, we're not at all convinced that a more individual approach will deliver better results.
• This may sound heretical, but we're genuinely not convinced that customers are always hugely impressed or delighted by a highly personalised approach, especially if the personalising requires any significant amount of extra effort on their part. Certainly there are aspects that will pretty much always be welcome, perhaps most of all in the ability to manage customer relationships with a much higher level of relevance and timeliness. But if personalisation generally means bells, whistles and complexity – even beneficial bells, whistles and complexity – a lot of people will decide they can't be arsed. (We appreciate the counter to this point, which is that good data should ultimately be able to highlight which customers will feel this way, and make sure they get nice simple stripped-down services that don't try their patience.)
• It would be wrong to underestimate the potential problems of what the industry tends to call creepiness, at least for some years yet. It may be that future generations won't worry about being followed around the Internet for months by insurers offering discounts off cover on the exact model of Jaguar they just checked out on a used car site but at the moment a lot of us find it a bit weird. And this kind of experience highlights an important new problem, in the emergence of a new category of ‘highly personalised junk’. If I decide against the Jaguar after that used car site visit then all that retargeting just becomes a tiresome intrusion.
• And finally, there is the cluster of perceptual issues around a group of words that includes fame, credibility, trust, confidence and awareness. Like the previous point, this may change over time. But as things stand today, it's not for nothing that many point-of-sale advertisers still make use of that old expression, ‘As Seen On TV’ – the fact of this kind of prominence does act as a reassurance to many.³ It's often said that for smaller organisations with shallower pockets, one of the great advantages of the digital world is that it enables every firm to appear the same size. From the perspective of smaller firms, that may well be a great advantage, but for many consumers it's uncomfortable. Many will seek indications of size, scale, stability and credibility – reassurances that giving their business (and money) to an unknown firm wouldn't be a stupid thing to do. Being seen to have a ton of money to spend on mass marketing (or half a ton, anyway) is one of the easiest, most visible and least fakeable ways that firms can do so.

On the whole, the steadily increasing ability to deliver what might be called ‘mass personalisation’ – that is, to personalise at scale, and at low cost – is one of the most significant developments in the consumer economy since the Industrial Revolution of 150 years ago.

While that revolution made it easy and affordable for us all to own the same things and have the same experiences, this new information revolution makes it possible for us all to own different, or personalised things and have different or personalised experiences. This, in turn, imposes huge challenges on companies dealing with consumers, requiring them to be able to adopt a consumer-centric view of the world so that they can understand, manage and optimise what those consumer experiences actually are. On the whole that's a very good thing, although also a very big and demanding thing.

But as is so often the case with brave new worlds, the old world isn't going away any time soon. For large, complex, long-established organisations, and in different ways for new, young, small ones, the real challenge is to plant one foot firmly in the new world – while keeping the other foot no less firmly in the old.

WORRY MOST ABOUT BEING IGNORED

We've written a whole chapter about this, so in this one we'll keep it brief. People responsible for developing marketing communications, and equally people responsible for approving them, worry about all sorts of things that might go wrong. Risk avoidance can be taken to amazing lengths. One of your authors remembers developing an ad for a banking client, with a visual that showed a photograph of a cliff-top path. There were no people in the shot, but the client worried that the path looked dangerous. At considerable expense, we had to retouch in a fence between the path and the cliff-edge before the ad could appear.

But while worrying to a preposterous degree about things that are never, ever going to happen, most people don't seem to worry at all about the thing that happens almost all the time: that your marketing communications activity will be ignored.

This is true of almost all activity, in all formats, addressing all target groups. It's just as true of mass advertising as it is of social media campaigns, YouTube films and individually addressed emails. Most consumers, whether customers or not, have horribly low expectations of marketing communication in financial services, and are willing to make virtually no effort at all to seek it out or engage with it.

And the fact is, they're not wrong. Much is, quite simply, dreadfully boring, and in some media there is literally little or nothing to relieve the tedium. Before writing this paragraph your authors have wracked their brains to try to find an exception, but when we think about financial services marketing material we can remember having received through our letterboxes, neither of us can recall a single example that made it worth the bother of opening the envelope. (Vast forests must have been reduced to barren tundra to meet the insatiable demands of Barclaycard's balance transfer mailings. But as soon as you see that logo on the envelope, you know it can go straight in the bin.) And don't get us started on those campaigns that mislead us by stamping the words ‘Private and Confidential’ on the envelope of a promotional pack…

Our message is simple. In the new financial services marketing, we deeply hope that everyone can manage to stop worrying about the danger of the clifftop path, and start worrying about the infinitely greater danger of the waste paper bin.

THE RULES OF DIRECT MARKETING STILL APPLY

This is a point that arguably shouldn't need making, and no doubt for some of our readers it doesn't. (Direct marketing gurus like John Watson, Steve Harrison, Rory Sutherland and others, if you're reading this feel free to skip on to the next bit.) It's a point that arises mainly, we think, for a single reason – a lot of the ways you can communicate on the Internet, particularly those to do with social media, don't cost anything.

As a result, a troublingly large number of financial services marketers, especially less experienced ones in smaller, younger, digitally driven firms, seem to believe that the economics of first acquiring customers, and then going on to build relationships with them over time, aren't a problem. Many of these firms apparently pay little attention to the basic economics and disciplines of consumer marketing, and in some cases seem to be pursuing business models that stand no chance at all of commercial success.

The fact is, amidst all the complexities, the basic business-plan numbers for a consumer-facing financial services business are simple. Fundamentally, you need to know:

• How much it costs to acquire a customer;
• How much it costs to deliver your products and services to that customer;
• How much revenue you can generate from that customer, either initially or over their lifetime.

Everyone knows these are the figures that matter. What they often don't know, though, is what these numbers are going to be in their specific case. And not least because everyone who starts up a new business has to be an optimist, many expect the numbers will work out a lot more favourably than they actually do. The fact is, customer acquisition in particular is almost always harder, slower and more expensive than those responsible for the business plan imagine. In particular, those lovely free social media turn out to be less-than-ideally suited for the task, and often not really free given the amount of time and money that need to be spent to make use of them. Social media are great for engaging with people you know, and have a relationship with. They're usually not so great for engaging with complete strangers.

In 2015, Lucian made a speech at a conference on the then-very-hot topic of robo advice (digital investment services) that attracted a lot of attention. It was on the subject of the first of those three numbers in the bullet-points above, the cost of acquiring customers. He said that as a universal average – so universal and so average as to have fairly minimal predictive value – on the basis of his 30 years' financial services direct marketing experience, across all product categories and all channels, he would tend to start off any plan with an initial assumption that it would be possible to generate a lead for £30, and a customer for £200. This, he said, would probably be reasonably accurate plus or minus, say, about 500%. Okay, he admitted, that's not very impressive – but at least it's a starting-point. Start there, and then go on to refine your own numbers in the light of your actual experience.

On the day, he felt embarrassed that these numbers were so vague and tentative. But to his surprise, they were seized upon eagerly, both on the day and subsequently – they've been re-quoted frequently, time after time, in a variety of reports and publications ever since. The reason was simple: for many of the people trying to make a success of direct-to-consumer investment businesses, these were the only figures they'd ever seen. For all their vagueness and tentativity, they were still better than nothing.

This is extraordinary, particularly since there is so much direct marketing material readily available – books, papers, awards submissions and agency case studies – that seem to be so widely ignored.

It's true that today, many of this industry's achievements seem more typical of yesterday's bad old days of financial services marketing than today's or tomorrow's. Too much of it was, and too often still is, characterised by overpriced, poor-quality products, sold on the basis of propositions that were often misleading and manipulative. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a great deal of valuable learning to be had from a vast amount of well-documented experience. And after all, it really isn't rocket science. If it is really true, for example, as widely believed, that some of today's digital direct businesses are paying £1000 to acquire a customer, but then going on to generate first-year revenue from those customers of less than £50, it does look as if there's a lot of good direct marketing practice that they need to learn – and quickly, too, before the funding runs out.

NOTHING MATTERS MORE THAN THE BRIEF

While we're on the subject of client/agency relationships, let us tell you about the single thing that goes most wrong most often (at least, from an agency point of view – if you have a view about what goes most wrong most often from a client point of view, please let us know at our website www.nosmallchange.co.uk).

Before we get into the detail of this, let's just pause to agree that in any piece of work that an agency is doing with, or for, a client, the brief is the only thing that really matters. Assuming (perhaps rashly) that everyone is reasonably competent at their job, then the finished product, whatever it is, is likely to be more or less as good as the brief. Excellent brief should lead to excellent outcome, terrible brief to terrible outcome and all points in between. Agree? Good.

So here's what would happen on virtually every job when one of your authors worked on direct marketing for a large, well-known High Street organisation – one which, like many, was organised by product team, savings, loans, mortgages, current accounts and so on, and with a centralised marketing function that acted as a service provider to all the product teams. Here's how more or less all those projects would go.

• Someone quite important in a product team (say, mortgages) decides that some kind of direct marketing activity to promote a particular product is required.
• This person calls a briefing meeting with someone from the marketing team. This marketing person is much younger, much less senior and knows little or nothing about mortgages.
• The quite important person hasn't thought about it very hard before the meeting, and so gives a vague, rambling and confusing account of what‘s needed. The marketing person doesn’t understand much of this, but doesn't want to admit it.
• The marketing person might write up an agency brief, and if so a copy might be sent to the product person. If so, the product person doesn't read it.
• The marketing person arranges a briefing meeting with the agency. There are various things that the agency doesn't understand and which the marketing person can't explain, so the agency requests a meeting with the product person. The marketing person isn't keen on this because it's a threat to their authority, so it probably won't happen.
• The agency works on the brief, using up much of the available time, and comes up with some pretty good ideas. These are presented to the marketing person, who seems quite positive, if a little unsure.
• There's then a presentation to the product person, which the agency might or might not attend. Either way, the product person is bewildered and usually incensed by what's being shown. What the hell is this, the product person asks. Wasn't anyone listening to a word I said? This is completely wrong. What I want is … (the product person now gives a much clearer brief than at the first attempt.) Now please go away and do what I asked for.
• Either in this meeting (if the agency is present) or subsequently (if not), the marketing person makes it clear that what has gone wrong here is entirely the agency's fault.
• Of the two weeks originally available for the job, there's now one day left. The agency will now go with any stupid idea it can think of that more or less meets the brief, because there isn't time to do anything else. This will be grudgingly approved, again because there isn't time to do anything else. The activity will go ahead.
• At the so-called washup meeting, when it's all over, the agency will be bitterly criticised for its poor listening skills and inability to follow a clear and simple brief.
• A few days later, another quite important person in another product team (say, savings) will decide that some direct marketing is needed.

We went round this pointless and depressing loop what seemed like dozens of times, the only significant difference being the identities of the product and marketing people, and the specific nature of the many different products we'd evidently so consistently failed to understand.

You might think that, learning from this experience, we'd insist on some kind of process improvement to solve the problem. Let the agency be in the briefing meeting with the product person, for example. Or insist that the marketing person does write an agency brief and the product person does read it, comment on it as necessary and sign it.

But proposals like these were never popular with the marketing people, because they created difficulties for them in their relationships with the product people (who, as the budget holders, were by far the dominant of the two groups). If the product people start dealing directly with the agency, or getting involved with agency briefs, why does the client need a centralised marketing function at all?

Even writing this brief account brings on a painfully vivid flashback of a miserable and frustrating time. Let's move on.

FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, TRY TO BE A GOOD CLIENT

If you work with external agencies, what do they really think of you? Not you personally, although if you're involved in the relationship that's kind of interesting, too, but your organisation as a whole? Are you a favourite client? A mediocre client? Or the one that everyone avoids like the plague?

There are two points to understand here. First, agencies do an incredibly much better job for their favourite clients than for their least favourite clients. This is partly for hard, quantifiable reasons (they put in far more hours, they allocate their very best people to the account, they see you as a flagship account for whom they can win creative awards), but it's more for qualitative, emotional reasons. They care more. They want to do well for you. They're proud of what they're doing. They're enjoying themselves.

And second, assuming that we're talking about a generalist agency here, you start with a major disadvantage – namely, that you're a financial services business. Many years ago, when Lucian was launching his first agency specialising in financial services, he commissioned what in hindsight was a remarkably large-scale and robust piece of market research among agency people to find out how they felt about working on accounts in different sectors. The research covered 10 sectors in all, including food, drink, automotive, travel, retail, technology and financial. Among a sample of 250 agency account handlers, creatives and planners, the picture could hardly have been clearer: in terms of both personal preference, and perceived quality of their own agency's output, financial came bottom by a distance.

It's true that this was a very long time ago, but we'd be surprised if the situation was very different today. Certainly the verbatim comments on why financial services performed so poorly still ring true today – too much regulation, too boring and complicated, conservative and risk-averse clients, generic and uninspiring propositions, no real intention of doing anything different. …

This doesn't sound good, but of course it's perfectly possible to buck the trend. While most creative teams tend to hide under their desks when colleagues are approaching with a financial brief, there are a few accounts that have consistently inspired. (There are also a few that have occasionally inspired, which can be almost as good – imagine the surprise and delight when comparethemarket.com actually bought the meerkat campaign).

What's curious is that, in our experience, so few clients have – or even seem to care about – any clear sense of where they stand in their agency's favourite-account pecking order. If you want great work and great service, we strongly recommend making it a key metric. It's very measurable.

Before we move on, we should mention an obvious tactic to overcome the handicap of being a financial services business. If you appoint one of the fairly small number of agencies that specialise in the sector, the problem goes away.

Many clients believe that in doing so, they simply swap one weakness for another – that while a specialist financial agency may be more enthusiastic about their business, its standards will be generally lower than a good generalist agency and its output won't be as good. We'd say that it's difficult to generalise, and it all depends. Some generalist agencies have performed brilliantly for financial clients, especially when those clients do fairly mainstream things like motor insurance and want to advertise a lot on television. But expecting a generalist agency with a centre of gravity tilted towards mainstream, mass-media, consumer products and services to do a great job on communicating an absolute return fund proposition to a target group of financial advisers is clearly absurd. No-one in the agency knows the first thing about it, and, worse, no-one cares: the client's best hope is that the job will be freelanced to a team from a specialist agency, whose costs will be marked up to a level several times higher than the client would have paid by going direct.

BETTER TO BE CONSISTENTLY (A BIT) WRONG THAN INCONSISTENTLY RIGHT

The era in which a football manager like Sir Alex Ferguson can do the same job for 27 years has now very nearly come to an end. (As we write, Arsene Wenger is still in charge at Arsenal after 20 years, but we'd be surprised if he's still there for more than, say, a year after this book is published. And no-one will ever manage a football club for as long as that again.) No confectionery advertising strapline will ever last as long as ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’ (which first appeared in 1959 and went on working, with occasional periods of rest, for well over 50 years) or ‘Bounty gives you the taste of paradise’, which was launched even earlier. And no small car will ever retain the same basic shape for as long as the original Mini (41 years) or the original VW Beetle (a startling 65 years).

It's a truism to say that life-cycles of almost all sorts have become faster (with the obvious exception of ourselves, since the life-cycles of human beings have become, on average, considerably slower or longer).

In marketing, we think very differently about the life-cycles of products and services, and even more so of communications campaigns. The old masters of brand-building in consumer goods – the Procters, the Unilevers, and the Marses responsible for the two straplines quoted above – believed that the task of deeply embedding a strong brand in the national consciousness took decades. It was a water-dripping-on-a-rock kind of business, year by year taking a slightly firmer hold on a little corner of the target market's brain.

Today, we can't understand what took them so long. The world is full of pretty well-established brands that haven't been around for one single decade, let alone several. Some of the digital brands provide the most obvious examples: which would you say is the stronger brand, Twitter (introduced in 2006) or another Mars confectionery brand like Topic (introduced over 40 years earlier, back in 1962).

And by the way, while you may think the comparison is hardly a fair one, it's worth pointing out that the Mars product has been supported by many times as much awareness-building TV advertising over that very much longer lifetime.

But.

This section is actually heading in the opposite direction to the previous few paragraphs.

As far as brand-building is concerned, even in this sped-up world of shortened life-cycles it's still important to give consumers a bit of time to get their heads round what you're saying. If you keep changing everything – moving on from one brand positioning to another, one organising idea to another, one look and feel, one tone of voice, on what seems like an annual basis – you'll simply never build a clear space in consumers' minds.

It's a curious paradox that financial services providers, and particularly those involved in long-term business like pensions, investments and insurance, chop and change everything to do with their brands and their communications so bewilderingly often.

It's not difficult to think of large, high-profile institutions which change their brand positionings with extraordinary frequency. Some – perhaps Barclays is the first to come to mind – seem scarcely able to sustain an idea for more than two years.

This kind of inconsistency must represent a gigantic waste of money. We say in our chapter on brands that the financial services industry has spent billions of pounds on brand communications over the years, and has only a small handful of genuinely differentiated brands to show for it. This ruinous and extravagant short-termism is one of the biggest reasons why.

We need to keep things moving in marketing these days. There's a pressing and unending need for innovation, for novelty, for something new that can capture attention and keep our customers engaged with us. But we need to innovate and originate within a longer-term framework, within a distinctive sense of what our brand stands for that isn't junked and restarted from scratch every year or two. A brand that's repositioned every couple of years simply isn't a brand at all.

MAKE SURE YOUR ORGANISING IDEA REALLY ORGANISES

This point follows on from the previous one. If we're going to wrap up a whole range of activity, addressing a whole range of consumers and consumer segments, relating to a whole bunch of propositions, over a long period of time, within a single overarching brand idea, then that brand idea is going to have to be fit for a very challenging and demanding range of purposes.

In our experience, far too often, especially in bigger and more complicated organisations, it just isn't. Typically, what happens is that the marketers embark on a quest for an ‘organising idea’, often with the help of an external agency – but, as they set off, have failed to appreciate the full range of situations in which this idea will have to be applied. The result is that before long, it becomes clear that it isn't fit for purpose – and before much longer, it's history and the next quest begins.

There's no shortage of examples. When it comes to short-lived brand strategies, Barclays is usually a reliable source of for-instances, and it doesn't let us down here. Some years ago Barclays introduced a brand strategy that focused on an approach to photography that it described as the ‘gallery of life’ – a real, vivid, human style of photography that showed their target groups living their daily lives, as they really were.

Unfortunately the plan failed to cope with the fact that Barclays then operated, and needed to promote itself, in many dozens of countries around the world, targeting people of many dozens of different ethnicities. This added enormously to the scale and cost of the approach. Worse, in some individual countries, populations were made up of several different ethnicities, not all of which reacted positively to real, vivid, human photographs of members of the others. The gallery of life quickly closed its doors.

But Barclays' most famously ill-fitting brand idea appeared a year or two later, this time with a verbal property rather than a visual one. The big idea was, quite literally, bigness – as the strapline put it, A big world needs a big bank. Unfortunately, as a result of not-untypically poor internal co-ordination, the TV advertising around this theme launched in the week that elsewhere in the bank, the PR team announced a programme of 200 branch closures, which obviously would have the effect of making Barclays a rather smaller bank. The strapline staggered on for a short while, but it was a dead copyline walking. A year or so later, the quest for a replacement began.

Barclays doesn't have a monopoly on this sort of thing. NatWest ran into a slightly different problem when launching an organising idea with a television campaign based around a fictional family, the Cannings, played by a bunch of well-known character actors. The problem here was a purely practical one – that the image rights to most of these actors had only been acquired for use in TV advertising. When other agencies on the NatWest roster – including the one led by one of your authors – tried to extend this property into other media, such as in-branch, print and mail, it emerged that only two of the most minor family members – from memory, the grandmother and the young son – were available. This was fine for retirement income and children's savings propositions, but unfortunately NatWest's range is rather wider than that.

Finally, though, it's worth adding that sometimes a remarkably inflexible-looking idea turns out to offer a lot more flexibility than you might imagine. An extremely simple play on words based on the fact that the word ‘market’ sounds quite like the word ‘meerkat’ didn't seem likely to last long as an organising idea for a big-spending, high-profile brand with a proposition that's pretty much all about saving money. Over the years the advertising for comparethemarket.com, it has to be said, has shown increasing signs of strain as a result of the need to express this kind of proposition within this organising idea – but, eight years later, the meerkats are still going strong.

APPROACH CONTENT MARKETING WITH GREAT SUSPICION.

Recently, we've all heard an extraordinary amount about content marketing. The phrase generates 25 million results on Google – which, for what it's worth, is not far short of half the number generated by that hottest of all recent topics, Big Data. The large majority of financial services firms claim to do at least some of it. Digital channels – especially social – are crammed full of it. Every freelance copywriter in the world has rebranded as a content creator (and wisely, too – ‘creating content’ pays about 50% better than ‘writing copy’).

These practical developments reflect a strong theoretical case. Arguably, as far as communications are concerned, a move into content marketing is the natural consequence of adopting a customer-centric approach. If we're focusing on our customers and their needs, it makes logical sense to engage with communications that they want to receive, rather than communications that we want to transmit.

So against this strong momentum in both practice and theory, it feels quite brave for us to say that in our view, most of it is complete tosh and a total waste of time, effort and money.

If that's true of most of it – and we'll make that case in a moment – what about the tiny proportion of which it isn't?

The tiny proportion that we would call worthwhile is the material that genuinely engages with the people you want to engage with, in a way that predisposes them at least to some extent to do business with you.

There's a story about how the peer and barrister Lord Birkenhead, way back in the period between the wars, would walk across St James's Park on his way to the House of Lords. On his way along Whitehall, he would invariably stop off to use the lavatories at the National Liberal Club. One day, exasperated, the doorman said to him, ‘You use our facilities so regularly, Lord Birkenhead, why don’t you become a member of the club?' The peer reacted with genuine surprise. ‘Good heavens’, he said, ‘I had no idea it was a club as well’.

Somehow there's an analogy here with even the most engaging content marketing: people may enjoy it, but do they have any real idea that it has a commercial purpose as well? (And in focusing on ‘the most engaging’ content marketing, we're limiting ourselves to a tiny proportion of the total – the overwhelming majority really isn't engaging at all.)

And beyond this, there's another big point: does your firm's content marketing have any effect at all in terms of differentiating and reinforcing your brand? And if not, why not? This is a slightly unfair example, but can you guess which general insurer's online magazine features articles with the following headlines?

• What Is Insurance Premium Tax?
• Infographic: What Is Condensation?
• Looking After Your Car Tyres
• Reviewed Your Insurance Lately?

Yes, it's a trick question – you can't possibly tell. These headlines are all absolutely generic to the world of insurance, and the magazine could come from anyone.

In fact, though, it come from Direct Line, currently we'd say the general insurer with the strongest, clearest and most distinctive brand positioning – as fixers and problem-solvers, as reflected in the Winston Wolf TV campaign. Why is there no trace of that positioning in this customer magazine?

We don't think that any content marketing is worth the time and cost unless it can pass three tests:

1. Does it really engage the target market?
2. Does it engage them in a way that, at least to some extent, draws them closer to doing business with us? (This is a very tough one to call.)
3. Does it help to differentiate our brand?

We don't think very much of the mountain of stuff that exists out there would survive all three of these tests.

TIME TO CLOSE UP THE FRONT OFFICE/BACK OFFICE DIVIDE

If you are indeed a financial services marketer, you may not like this much. It's all about taking on a stack of extra work, with very little extra money available: what's more, most of it is boring to do, and there's no glory in it.

Taken together, these are probably the main reasons why most marketing people have generally wanted as little as possible to do with that large raft of communication of one sort or another that is broadly said to come out of the back office – and also, rather mysteriously in our view, out of something called the ‘middle office’, that we would generally struggle to locate.

The fact is, though, that our widespread failure to get a grip on this stuff is absolutely indefensible. If it's true (which it is) that financial services brands are overwhelmingly experiential, and if it's true that from a customer perspective the large majority of experiences, over time, are encounters with back-office communications, then it clearly makes absolutely no sense for these to remain as a marketing-free zone left largely in the hands of Ops people.

The failings here are of two main kinds, and both kinds are serious. The first are what you might call sins of commission: much of the material that's sent out is horribly badly written, badly conceived, badly designed, and badly produced. The second are the sins of omission – the communications that don't happen at all, but really could or should.

As a case in point, one of your authors has a 25-year term insurance policy, arranged by an adviser and provided by a household name insurer. The policy is now into its last year, and over that period he has paid a large five-figure sum in premiums. In that time, he has never heard a single word from either adviser or provider.

Many marketing people have had depressing experiences on forays into this back-office area. At one time or another, for example, most of us have become excited about the possibility of developing our firms' statements of one kind or another so that they can do double duty as a marketing tool. We arrange a few meetings to investigate. It quickly becomes apparent that we're facing a toxic combination of horrendous IT problems, and deeply entrenched silo positions. After a short while, we withdraw and get on with something nice and easy like redesigning the website.

But really we can't go on like this. Being responsible for the customer experience except what comes out of the back office is a bit like running a restaurant and closely managing every aspect of the customer's experience except the food.

SPEND MORE MONEY ON INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Our final discussion is the companion-piece to the previous item, and makes basically exactly the same argument. If it's true (which it is) that financial services brands are overwhelmingly experiential, and if it's true that from a customer perspective the large majority of experiences, over time, are encounters with your organisation's people, then it clearly makes absolutely no sense for these to remain as a marketing-free zone left large in the hands of the HR department.

You may be on top of this one. In our experience, rather more marketing teams have got a grip of internal comms than of communications from the back office. But even so, there are a great many that haven't.

Sometimes there are some major structural problems in the way. The trickiest is probably the growing enthusiasm for outsourcing, even of frontline customer service functions. When one of your authors, together with his client, visited the outsourced customer service team of one large life and pensions company, we were told we were not just the first marketing people, but in fact the very first people of any description from the client company, to actually spend time in the call centre.

It's not just a question of doing stuff, and keeping an eye on how it's going with an annual staff survey. It's a question of treating the internal audience like any other key target audience, developing and executing a proper plan, complete with objectives, budget and timetable, and running a tailored programme of relevant metrics to understand what you're achieving. If you're doing all this already, congratulations. The great majority of your competitors aren't.

We began this list by saying it would represent some of the ways in which the marcomms of the future would differ from the marcomms of the past. Looking back over it, and appreciating that several of the points it makes look a) difficult to implement, and b) not always enormously appealing to marketers, perhaps we might have said ‘should differ’, not ‘would’.