No-one at all familiar with our CVs will be surprised to find this book calling vigorously – indeed, passionately – for more and better marketing in retail financial services. Between us, after all, we've been focused on financial services marketing for over 60 years. After such a very long time, it would cast a large and dark cloud over both our careers if we concluded there wasn't much to be said for it.

Naturally, we haven't. On the contrary, we're convinced that good marketing is the driving force behind a virtuous circle, in which companies succeed by providing customers with things they want and need. And the reverse, we believe, is also true: if customers aren't getting things they want and need, and/or the companies providing them aren't succeeding, then by definition there must be a lack of good marketing.

But while you might justifiably think that our belief in the benign power of marketing can be more than a little idealistic, we don't want you to think we're naive. This book wouldn't be useful if it was just a plea for peace, love and understanding to enlighten the wicked world of financial services.

In particular, there are two kinds of naivety from which we're determinedly immune. First, while this book certainly doesn't hold back from criticism of the financial services industry, we don't believe that practices in financial services are much worse than in other major sectors of the consumer economy. For reasons we'll consider, we think there has been more marketing in most other sectors, but we don't think that much of it has been better. It seems to us that in a competitive world where it's increasingly difficult for firms to behave with transparent fairness and still make profits, sustain their share price and hit their bonus targets, a lot of opacity and unfairness are all too common. Whether it's car builders cheating emissions tests, or international corporates creating elaborate structures to duck local taxes, or digital media owners channelling advertisers' money to terrorists and paedophiles, or just supermarkets injecting chicken breasts with water to increase their weight and price, there are a great many more pots than kettles. And these examples, of course, have all broken the golden rule ‘Thou shalt not get found out’: how many others still remain unknown?

The second species of naivety that we don't entertain is perhaps more fundamental. Our championing of ‘good marketing’ can, we know, sound a little hippy-dippy. Oversimplified, our message can take on a tree-hugging tone, seeming to propose a world of total transparency, uncompromising quality and rock-bottom pricing, in which consumers' needs are always perfectly identified and met by means of sales and marketing techniques that ooze with fairness, balance and impartiality.

To be clear, we don't think marketing can or should be like that at all. Marketing is by its nature a partisan and persuasive activity, intended to encourage people to do things they otherwise would not have done: buy a firm's products and services in preference either to other firms', or to not buying anything at all; pay more than the lowest price for a product, in the belief that it's worth the extra; pay attention to a communication that they otherwise might have ignored. In all these ways and many others, marketing is manipulative and self-serving. It has to be. But our point is that at the same time, it can and should serve the interests of consumers, too.¹

This book discusses why we think it's important and urgent that it should do so much better, and much more often, than previously, and then goes on to examine, in some detail, what we think ‘better’ should look like.

These views are based on a very great deal of experience, but still in the end they are just views. We'd take some persuading that financial services marketing doesn't need to move on, but we're very open to persuasion about exactly how. One of the least controversial themes of the book is that when it comes to communication, what once was a monologue must now be reframed as a dialogue, and what's true of financial services marketing is also true of books on the subject. If you'd like to agree with, disagree with, add to or indeed subtract from anything you read here, we'd love to hear from you.