Lucian’s blog

Not my most accessible-ever headline.  What on earth do I mean?

Travel with me first to Regent’s Park on a dark evening a week or two ago.  Driving home, I narrowly miss a cyclist, dressed in black and showing no lights, riding absolutely invisibly in the middle of the road.  A little further on he stops alongside me at a traffic light, and I wind down my window and suggest entirely aimiably that he’d give me a sporting chance of missing him if he fitted some lights.  He launches a tirade of hysterical abuse and makes to get off his bike and reach in to assault me.  Fortunately, at this point the traffic light changes.

Now let’s go on - painful though it is for me - to Wembley Stadium yesterday.  It’s my beloved Spurs vs Portsmouth in the FA Cup semi-final.  We’re some way short of our best, but we’re absolutely all over them - having, according to the BBC, 31 attempts on goal compared to their 12, and winning 20 corners to their 7.  It’s one of those days when the ball just will not go into the net (and when it does, the ref quite wrongly disallows it).  You might imagine that the 40,000 Spurs fans present would be roaring their team on, providing every ounce of available encouragement to turn domination into victory.

But you’d imagine wrong. Where I was sitting - and, I strongly suspect wherever you were sitting among the Spurs fans - what you’d have heard would have been foul, vituperative abuse.  The fans around me hated our team, and especially certain players in it, with an absolute passion.  They missed no opportunity to scream filthy insults at them.  They detested our team far more than they detested our opponents - and far, far more than our opponents’ fans detested Spurs.  Sitting among these people was a miserable experience, almost more miserable than losing 2-0.

What do I conclude from these two experiences?  That there are an awful lot of Travis Bickles out there, maintaining the semblance of a normal daily life but permanently on the brink of an outbreak of psychotic rage.  I don’t know how many - sometimes it seems like it’s almost everyone - but it’s definitely a lot.

It’s a deeply depressing thought.  But if you’re one of the many marketing evangelists who’s keen to invite consumers into ever-more-active roles in owning, building and projecting your brand, it’s also a deeply scary one.  Nestle rightly picked up flak recently for their clumsy attempts to prevent the interactive part of their website from being hijacked by anti-corporate saboteurs.  But although their response was silly and counterproductive, the issue they faced was a real and difficult one which more and more organisations offering open access to anyone who fancies it are sure to encounter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Spurs website doesn’t provide anything much by way of chatrooms or discussion boards.  It’s a pity - a lot of 21st century marketing, comms and CRM people would say it’s a major missed opportunity to engage with the fans and build a truly customer-focused, 21st-century style brand.  But those people should keep quiet until they’ve had the experience I had at Wembley yesterday.  You really wouldn’t want any of those psychos anywhere near your website.

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In recent weeks, I seem to have been writing myself into a new role as a sceptic about the commercial potential of social media.  I’m not at all sure why I’m doing this:  it’s a role that’s very largely at odds with what I really believe.  In fact, I’ve been saying for a couple of years or more that a) probably the single most important thing about the Internet is the way it enables people to communicate sideways with each other and to form themselves into “communities” of one sort or another, and b) this aspect creates enormous opportunities for financial services providers, who need to think hard, and fast, about what they should be doing about it.

But it’s not the conceptual arguments that I’m sceptical about.  What I’m sceptical about is the extent to which brands, and their marketing and communications activities, are likely to penetrate online social media which exist, and succeed, for quite different purposes.

Yes, it is possible to come up with amusing and entertaining ideas that can go quite spectacularly viral, whether it’s Evian’s dancing babies on YouTube or Aleksandr the meerkat’s fan club on Facebook.  And it may be possible - although harder - to “monetise” these ideas (not the world’s most elegant verb):  the dancing babies allegedly did wonders for Evian sales, although they say the meerkat-loving kids and teenagers in Aleksandr’s fan club are way off-demographic for comparethemarket.com’s customer acquisition purposes.

But anyway, despite these and many other high-profile forays, I still think that users’ willingness to allow brands and marketers to colonise their social media is likely to remain distinctly limited.  Certainly they will allow some brands to become part of the social media landscape, but only a very small number which are behaving in an exceptionally engaging and entertaining way.  At any one time, the overwhelming majority just won’t be doing anything interesting enough to earn much attention or support.

For example, I’ve heard several times in conference presentations recently that everyone with any responsibility for any brand should regularly search brandname#fail on Twitter, to check out the level of flak tweets it’s taking.  But the truth is that in financial services, searching on the very biggest names in banking reveals mere handfuls of negative and mainly incomprehensible tweets, while searching on other names - even big ones like Direct Line or JP Morgan - reveals nothing at all.

Similarly, if you search a financial brand name on Facebook, you may well find a surprisingly long list of mentions:  but on closer examination you’ll find that all, or nearly all, are entirely uninteresting and innocuous.  Search BUPA, for example, and you’ll find 7,800 listings.  But as far as I can see (I haven’t clicked on all of them…) 98% of the time the name only appears within people’s biographical details, as a current or past employer. 

This may all change.  People enduring any kind of bad experience from a financial services provider may launch immediately into vituperative tweeting.  Large groups may form on Facebook dedicated to vigorous discussion of cash ISA rates.  (At the moment, possibly as a result of poor searching technique, I can’t find anything for ISA or SIPP on Facebook at all.)

But I must say, I doubt it.  All the evidence from elsewhere in the world is that brands are allowed into people’s personal spaces, but only to a limited extent and only on terms that are acceptable to the people occupying the spaces.   Somewhat reluctantly, we accept advertising on television and radio, but have always been uncomfortable with overly blatant forms of product placement;  we don’t object to beer mats in the pub, but might be a bit surprised to find sample packs of washing powder on the tables;  we expect to see perimeter advertising at football grounds, but wouldn’t like to see our team’s captain pick up a microphone and deliver a message about, say, an aftershave brand before kick-off.

In the same way, it seems to me that we’d quickly become very unhappy if,  whenever we logged on to Facebook or Twitter, we found a seething hubbub of brands jostling so noisily for our attention that we could barely discern the presence of the friends and family members we actually went there to engage with.  (In fact, on Facebook, I’ve recently Removed As Friends a couple of organisations that I decided I was hearing from altogether a bit too often:  I could hardly find anything from anyone I actually knew among the endless blizzard of messages from the organisers of the Marciac Jazz Festival.)

In short, I think that if commercial organisations want to use online networking for their own purposes, on the whole they’ll need to set up their own networks and communities rather than hijack ones that people have built for other reasons.  There’s huge potential for this - still very largely untapped - in financial services.  When there’s a financial issue on my mind, I’d be delighted to be able to go somewhere to talk about it with other people in the same position.  But that’s a million miles away from believing that writing, or reading, daily tweets on the same subject will ever become part of my routine.

OK, OK, it’s a fair cop, I’ve no idea how any of these things are going to develop.  Anything I say on the subject is almost certain to be wrong.  

But, at least as far as social media are concerned, I’d like to think perhaps no wronger than anyone else.

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Congratulations to our old friend and current client James Budden and his colleagues at Baillie Gifford on the launch of their new website which provides an online counterpart to their established offline investment trust magazine, Trust.  You can see it for yourself at http://www.bgtrustonline.com/.

Whether offline or now online, its name is in fact by some distance the least interesting aspect of what is generally a very lively publication - well-conceived, well-designed and generally well-written.  I can actually imagine investors in the Baillie Gifford-managed investment trusts being quite pleased when the latest edition lands on their doormats.

As such, it’s a member of a very small minority of “house” publications whose envelopes may actually be opened during their brief journey from letterbox to bin.  (Also among this elite group I would include accountants BDO’s excellent publication 33 Thoughts and a beautifully-designed and well-written customer magazine with a sadly unmemorable name from Coutts, neither of which, come to think about it, seems to have dropped through my letterbox for some while now.)

For obvious reasons concerned with what I do for a living, I throw away very little marketing communication unread.  But, on the whole, I make an exception for customer magazines and newsletters.  Even when they’re not actually criminally dull, they’re still almost always very dull indeed.  And the thing is that like an awful lot of people, I have such a ridiculous quantity of material that I could and indeed should read that there’s no way I’m going to bother with anything optional unless it’s quite exceptionally interesting.

You might imagine this is a point so obvious that there’s no need whatever to make it.  But keep an eye on the rubbish coming through your letter box and you’ll realise it still needs making very badly indeed.  I’d estimate that 90% of all copies of all customer publications are thrown away unread, rendered useless and pointless by their catastrophic uninterestingness.

The regular reader of this blog (who he? Ed) will recognise that the financial penalties resulting from uninterestingness are something of a pet theme of this blog.  I bang on about them a lot in the context of advertising and direct marketing, so much so that I fear I may myself be losing interestingness through excessive repetition.  Still, in broadening my scope to embrace customer publications, at least I’m doing something slightly livelier.

Even if not quite as lively as James’s excellent new online initiative.

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Big day for me yesterday.  A few months ago my friends at that admirable organisation The Financial Services Forum (www.thefsforum.co.uk) asked me to set up another in their family of Special Interest Groups, this one to concentrate on brand strategy, and yesterday was the group’s first event.  The title was Just How Different and Special Are Financial Services Brands?, and we had three excellent speakers addressing the question from three different angles:  Mike Hoban outlining some of the key issues involved in building brands in non-financial service markets (airlines, retail and so forth);  Tim Pile doing the same with a focus on fast-moving consumer goods;  and Justin Basini concentrating on financial services.  We continued this compare-and-contrast format in a good hour of discussion with the 100 or so people who turned up.

I must say, it all seemed to go very well, and as chairman of the proceedings I was extremely grateful to the three speakers who all did make excellent presentations and, equally important, didn’t over-run - and also to all those attending, who kept up a steady flow of questions and comments and spared me from any trace of anxiety about the whole session drying up and coming to an embarrassing close half an hour early.

Anyway, it seemed important to try to fabricate some conclusions from the discussion, so at the end I asked for some shows of hands - particularly on the question of whether building brands in financial services is a) harder than, and b) different from, building brands in FMCG or in non-financial services.

When it came to the comparison with FMCG, absolutely everyone thought financial services are harder and over 95% thought they’re different. And when it came to the comparison with non-financial services, everyone thought financial services are harder or equally hard, and about two-thirds of those voting thought they were different.

I was pleased with these results.  Way back in my early days as an FS specialist, I used to go on about all this a lot - in fact, I think I may even have once written an agency brochure on the subject called Not Like Baked Beans, my not-so-hidden agenda obviously being to discourage clients from being irrelevantly seduced by non-specialist agencies’ work for other clients in other markets.

After a while, I got bored, partly because almost everything gets boring after a while but also because clients paid this line of argument no attention whatsoever.   Still, with definitive and quantitative new evidence available, maybe I should summon up some new enthusiasm and try to relaunch the whole issue.  I could hardly be less successful with it than I was last time.

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If someone tells me that A is much the same as B, my hackles rise.  Au contraire, I reply.  B could hardly be more different.  There may be a few superficial similarities.  But on closer examination, well, chalk and cheese doesn’t begin to do justice to the gulf that exists between them.  Chalk and, I don’t know, maybe woodpeckers, more like.

But then, of course, if someone tells me that A is in fact very different from B, guess what.  Not to me, it isn’t.  There may be a few superficial differences.  But on closer examination, two peas in a pod doesn’t begin to do justice to the resemblance.  Two cloned sheep in a pen, maybe.

I suppose these two reactions position me a a contrarian.  And one of the things that brings out the contrarian in me is this digital natives vs digital immigrants thing.

Of course I accept that there is now a generation, reaching young adulthood, for whom the digital world is home turf. They’ve known it since they were very small.  They’re entirely at home there.  They lead large chunks of their lives online.  Their online and offline lives co-exist.  Marketers who want to reach them should think about ways to engage with them online at least as much as offline, if not more.  Engaging with them online is fairly different.  And so on and so on.

But what I don’t really accept is that in almost all of these respects, they’re really all that different from older people - including some much older people - who work in offices.  Yes, it’s true that I started my working life right at the tail end of the era of manual typewriters.  Then there were great big whirring clunking electric typewriters.  Then word processers with green type on black screens.  Then desktops.  Then laptops.  Then blackberries.  Then cloud computing which only needs a keyboard and an internet connection.  But the thing is, that may make me a immigrant rather than a native - in fact, it may make me a somewhat rootless expatriate, roaming across technologies like an HSBC international banker roams across territories.  But is the place where you’ll find me today all that different from the place where you’ll find, say, my 16-year old son Oliver?

I am, of course, online from the moment I get to work till the moment I leave, and even after I leave there’s the mobile, the Blackberry, the laptop downstairs beside the sofa and the desktop in the study.  When I’m out and about, there’s the Blackberry and I very much hope there’ll be wireless internet:  when it was down on the East Coast Main Line the other day, I was so lost that the only thing I could think of doing was going to sleep.

On this machine, here at the office, I keep at least three browsers open, each for different websites that I use throughout the day.  One of those is the middle-aged businessman’s social networking site du choix, LinkedIn:  I do Facebook minimally, but I link in a lot.  I blog, and read other blogs, many of them written by people at least as old as I am.  I engage with hundreds if not thousands of brands on the internet, not least because I do 98% of my non-food shopping there.  I don’t tweet much, because I’m too verbose, but I do follow a few people who have brief-but-interesting things to say.  And just like Oliver, I live in online and offline worlds simultaneously:  while he’s texting on his phone in an English lesson, I’m doing my emails on the Blackberry in a research presentation.

Ollie does online gaming and I don’t, but apart from that I can’t see  any fundamental difference in the way that we balance our online and offline lives.

Sorry that this all sounded so me me me.  I didn’t really mean “me.”  I meant us.  In all the respects I’ve just described, I don’t think I’m any different from several million other office workers.

And if that’s right, two questions arise.

First, behind the similarities in our behaviour, does the fact that Ollie is a digital native while I’m an immigrant imply some underlying differences between us?  If so, it’s hard to see what they are.  Those days of electric typewriters seem a million years ago to me now.  Or the days when if you wanted to buy something, you had to get off your arse, go out of the house and visit something called a “shop.”

Vice versa, I should also say that Ollie’s digital nativeness (?) doesn’t mean that he can’t relate to the offline world, or that he relates to it in some odd and digital way.  On a Saturday afternoon he could watch the football live online, on some pirate Romanian website.  But in fact we traipse up Tottenham High Road to White Hart Lane just as previous generations have done, the only difference being that during the game we keep up with BBC Live Text on phone screens rather than listening to radio earpieces jammed in our ears.   If there is a significant difference at any level between native and long-established immigrant, I can’t see it.

But then second - and, you’ll be pleased to hear, last - if there isn’t a significant difference, then what about all this stuff we keep hearing about how brands need to engage in completely new and different ways with young, digital native markets?

It’s certainly true that teenagers like Ollie relate to a lot of brands that mean nothing to their 50-something parents.  It was ever thus.  And it’s certainly true that the Internet presents gazillions of new ways, and new opportunities, for brands to relate to their target groups, more or less whoever those target groups may be.  This is big, and important, and wonderfully exciting.  But are there special rules which brands have to understand if they want to engage with Ollie - rules that don’t apply if they only want to engage with boring old me?  If so, I can’t see what they are.

There are brands that Ollie engages with very closely - Tottenham Hotspur, Nando’s, Audi, Lucozade Sport - that he encounters almost entirely in the offline world.  There are others that he encounters only online - and quite a few that he encounters in both.

The same goes for me.  Some of my strongest brand relationships - Aston Martin, Red Stripe, Wisden, Waitrose - exist only offline.  Others - I suppose Amazon is the obvious one - only online.  And many in both.

Enough already.  If I haven’t made my point by now, I never will.  The digital world provides wonderful new opportunities for brands to engage with consumers.  In many areas - perhaps financial services in particular - we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what these opportunities may be.  Most of the best, and most exciting, will be new, and different, and specific to the interactive nature of the medium.  I’m loving all of that.

What I’m not loving is the idea that all these possibilities should be focused wholly, or largely, on the upcoming generation of digital natives, to the exclusion of other target groups who in fact blend offline and online lives in virtually identical ways;  or the idea that if you are targeting the digital natives then online is now the only game in town.

I don’t love these ideas a) because I don’t think they’re true, but also b) because they seem to me to try to create distinctions and compartments and separations where none really exists.  Whatever we’re doing, and whoever we want to engage with, we have a hugely-expanded - and expanding - range of ways to do so.  Comparing us to previous generations toiling at the brand, marketing and communications coalface, that’s the really big difference - chalk and woodpeckers, indeed.

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Some - well, actually, many - would say that banking has been more than interesting enough for the last couple of years.  But not those of us involved in brand, marketing and communications.

For us, it’s been extremely dull.  It’s been a long time now since the new-wave banks of the 80s and early 90s ran out of interestingness and reverted to type:  First Direct’s wild and wacky launch advertising is 20 years ago now;  Egg curdled overnight when it was bought by Citi, and turned from consistently the most interesting organisation in the market into the grimmest and most cynical;  and I’m not quite sure what happened to the likes of Smile and Cahoot.

At the same time, any tiny flickers of interestingness have been extinguished from the advertising and marketing campaigns of the big High Street players.  Howard riding on the back of a giant swan seems like Citizen Kane compared to Halifax’s current desperate radio-station commercials.  NatWest’s advertising isn’t even interesting hateful any more, it’s just deadly dull.  I’ve written dubiously about The World’s Local Bank before, but even if you accept it as a high-level brand strategy you have to admit it doesn’t give you anywhere sensible to go when you’re trying to promote a competitive cash ISA.   Who else?  Barclays?  Lloyds’ sad little people?  Santander?  Pleeeease.

It could hardly get worse.  But actually, it looks as if it might get better.  There’s a flurry of new activity at the niche end of the spectrum, with my good friend Anthony Thomson and his Metro Back currently closest to the starting line, and Mr Branson and Mr Leahy marshalling what I suspect may be rather greater firepower and entering the fray a little later.  And even among the big players, I’m intrigued by the piece in this week’s Marketing about HSBC betting the ranch on a range of “sub-brands,”which in a conference presentation only a couple of weeks ago were being described rather evasively as “propositions” by the HSBC speaker.  And then there’s this rather confusing story (well, to me anyway) about other big High Street banks (NatWest?  Northern Rock?) shedding some of their networks and - have I got this completely wrong  - bringing back the Williams & Glyns name.

Well, it’s not the longest list I ever wrote - and not the most definitive, either, tailing off into confused speculation at the end.  But at least it’s something.  I suspect that if there is a new burst of banking interestingness it may very likely have more to do with innovative marketing than off-the-wall advertising - in these troubled times I fear that many consumers would rather stay on the wall than leap off it.  But I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d be grateful for any new signs of life in this benighted sector.

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Creative people - and I say this as someone who still counts himself among them, even though I pick up a pen in anger fairly rarely these days - are awful.  Selfish, egocentric, lazy, bad-tempered and, worst of all, just dreadfully conservative.  We hate change. We think things were brilliant in the past, are much worse in the present and will be absolutely awful in the future.

Which is why I respond extremely cautiously, to say the least, to the new Big Idea that has swept across a large chunk of my agency group (not, actually, including my own agency, Tangible, or at least not yet).

This new Big Idea is something called Co-Creation, and it’s championed by one of the agencies within my group, Face, who indeed describe themselves as Co-Creation specialists.  If you want to know more about it please visit http://ldn.co-creationhub.com/, but in a nutshell the Big Idea is that Big Ideas about brands - new products, websites, comms, ads, promotions, whatever - should be developed by means of a process that involves groups of people from the client company, from the agency and from the target market all working together in a collaborative process.

This is clearly an idea that brings multiple zeitgeisty things together into a single uber-zeitgeist. There’s the whole crowd-sourcing thing, the user-generated content thing, the interactive thing, the social networks thing, the collaborative working thing, the online research thing (Face are originally a market research company) and all sorts of other things you can read about in Revolution and New Media Age all brought together into a single process.  Face are doing very well with it - so well that various other parts of my group have decided that they want a piece of the co-creation action, and have joined together to establish the Co-Creation Hub thing whose web address I gave you a minute ago.

If you visit it for a moment, you’ll understand why I approach it with extreme caution - the kind of caution with which a platoon in Helmand Province approaches a bump in the road with wires protruding from it.  On the home page, for example, you’ll see a link to a White Paper called “Do Brands Really Need Agencies?”.  And although the white paper concludes that they may do, kind of, it certainly seems that they don’t need agencies’ creative departments:  instead, they need a series of workshops made up of clients and consumers and moderated by people from Face.

My problem - and, I suspect, the problem of 99% of creative people - begins right at the beginning, with the Co-Creation Hub strapline.  This says simply “Doing Things With, Not At.”  I get it.  Of course I get it.  I’ve read all the case studies, seen all the online co-created businesses, learned how you can harness the energy and enthusiasm of consumers to shape and build your brand.  (It also hasn’t escaped my attention that this is an extremely cheap way of maintaining a brand, a significant point in these tough times.)

But, like 99% of creative people, I don’t basically buy it.  I don’t basically accept that the best way to do creative things is “with, not at.”  From Romeo and Juliet to the Shake’n'Vac commercial, all the great flowerings of creativity have been done at, not with.   Like 99% of creative people I accept that up to a point, the consumer and indeed the client can play a valuable part in this process. We need to listen to them, engage with them, understand them.  But there comes a point where you have to send all those people away, close the door, wrap a towel round your head, and either on your own or with a trusted partner stay in that room until inspiration strikes.

After that, you may well go back to everyone - clients, colleagues, consumers - to make sure that your great idea works as you thought and hoped it would.  And after that, you may need all sorts of co-creationists (photographers, film directors, illustrators, actors, whatever) to give substance to your creation.  But the actual creative process itself isn’t with, it’s at.  And it isn’t co-, it’s solo.

In saying this, I know I’m sounding like a dinosaur.  At the very least I’m deeply, deeply out of fashion - Face are developing their co-creation business about 20 times quicker than any other part of the group, including my bit.  And actually, I’m almost certain that it’s worse than that.  This isn’t just a fashion thing, it’s a step change, and there’s no going back.

That being so, I’m delighted that my group is right at the forefront of the change.  And not least as someone who holds quite a few shares in it, I enthusiastically encourage everyone to visit   http://ldn.co-creationhub.com/, to get in touch with my co-creationist colleagues and, if you’re a client with a large budget, to allocate it to them immediately.

But as an agency creative who has been surrounded for decades by clients, account handlers, planners and researchers all bitterly resenting the way that this stroppy, difficult, lazy bunch of people get almost all the glory going despite playing such a limited part in the process, I can’t help suspecting that at another level, the success of co-creation reflects a long-sought opportunity for revenge.

With researchers, clients and consumers in charge of the whole creative process, it’s not that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  On the contrary, it’s that the asylum is now firmly back under the control of the warders and the administrators.

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I don’t even begin to understand the brand valuation formulae used by the leaders in the field - notably Interbrand and David Haigh’s Brand Finance - and I’m very happy to keep it that way.  I don’t suppose I’d get it anyway, even if I tried, but in any case there’s no point, because it’s all obviously complete tosh.

Brand Finance has just published its Top 500 most valuable global banking brands, and I’d like to share a couple of highlights with you.

First, I’m sure you’d like to congratulate Santander on their storming rise up the charts, to number 3 in the overall table and number 1 among retail banks.  Just before you start on the congratulations, though, you might like to consider what was said by a speaker from Santander at the conference at which the Top 500 was launched:  that Santander think of themselves as being at the very earliest stages of developing and implementing their global brand strategy, and in fact that of the 14 countries around the world where they’re a major retail player, they were only actually trading under the Santander brand in one (Spain) at the time the valuations were calculated. 

Yet according to David’s formula, the Santander brand is nevertheless more valuable than, say, Deutsche, Credit Suisse and Standard Chartered put together.  And if that’s right, then I’m a Dutchman - and a rather disappointed Dutchman, actually, since according to David my global direct savings brand ING Bank is worth a little less than a tenth of Santander’s.

This is so stupid that I can’t believe people were able to sit through a presentation of these results with straight faces.  But it gets worse.

Way down at No. 206, with a brand allegedly worth £565 million, I find Carol Vordermann’s favourite sub-prime lender, FirstPlus.  This horrible business is just about as distressed as its customers these days, and the home page of the website tersely announces that FirstPlus is no longer making new loans to customers.

As you’re getting the hang of this preposterous league table by now, you probably won’t be surprised to find that the Coutts brand, one of the best-known and most powerful in financial services, ranks some way below FirstPlus. But how far below?  Well, about 175 places below, in fact.  Coutts comes in at No. 381, with a brand valued at £192 million - a little over a third of FirstPlus.  This may actually be the silliest statistic that I’ve ever seen published in my entire business career.

I don’t think I can find anything more absurd than this in the table, but you may be amused to hear that the much-loathed and financially-troubled doorstep lender Provident Financial ranks about 70 places, and £100 million, above Coutts in the survey too.  And if you can find me anyone on this planet who is willing to pay £100 million more for the Provident Financial brand than for the Coutts brand, I will borrow £1000 from you and pay you back at Provident Financial’s standard APR.  Which is something over a thousand per cent.

It’s tempting to chuckle bleakly at the folly of all this.  But there’s a genuinely scary side to it:  this pathetic science of brand valuation is the best shot that we brand-builders have in our locker when it comes to winning the support - and the financial backing - of finance directors and senior corporate management for our brand development plans.

Using stuff like this, we just make fools of ourselves.  How would you feel going to the main board of, say, Coutts, with a plan to spend £50 million on the brand over the next five years - and then, when they ask what results can be expected from this investment, only being able to say that by the year 2015 you anticipate that the Coutts brand may be almost as valuable as Provident Financial’s?   Absolutely idiotic?  I thought so.

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Went to a conference about bank branding recently, and hated it.  The whole event felt, oddly, like a gathering of medieval physicians discussing the latest thinking on the medical use of leeches:  earnest, intense, full of zeal and certainty, but actually - as subsequent events would prove - about 95% wrong.

The keynote speaker was someone responsible for a very large bank’s global brand strategy.  She made a very odd presentation, falling basically into two halves.

In the first half, she explained how a close study of the international branding strategies available had convinced her that a single global master brand was the right option for her bank.  She explained how her thinking had been influenced by other best-of-breed global brands:  McDonald’s, BMW and Coca-Cola were three that she cited approvingly.

In the second half, she went on to explain how, beneath her global master brand, the bank now catered for its target markets’ needs by means of five segmented “propositions” - individually named and promoted packages of services relevant to each of the five groups.  She focused on two, the upmarket package for older and more affluent people, and the package for younger customers earlier in their careers.  Of the other three, one is for small businesses, one is for big businesses and I don’t know anything about the fifth.

I must say, I can’t decide which half of the presentation I found harder to understand. 

 In the first half, it seemed to me that her analysis of these “global master brands” was simply wrong.  Although McDonald’s, BMW and Coke are all extremely strong brands, I wouldn’t say that any of them stand alone by any means as monolithic master brands.  I’d say that McDonald’s has quite clearly and deliberately developed a growing range of sub-brands, connecting either to products (Big Mac) or to packages (Happy Meals) or to other elements of their iconography (the bizarre and frightening Ronald McDonald).  I’d say that although BMW products have boring names, to their target markets these are product brand identities rich in rational and emotional engagement:  for any petrol-head the simple prefix “M” - as in M3 and M5 - says everything that needs to be said about the high-performance variant of BMW’s saloons, and actually to those who know and care about such things the difference between, say, 316 and 335 is all the difference in the world.   

But the oddest of her three examples is undoubtedly Coca-Cola.  Within the Coke family, it seems to me that the company is trying to create at least one distinct sub-brand, Coke Zero, and probably more.  But much more importantly, the Coca-Cola Corporation has a whole range of other brands in its portfolio, including Sprite, Dr Pepper, Fanta, Powerade and Malvern mineral water, among many others.  Corporately, Coca-Cola absolutely isn’t a master-brander at all:  it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, as a leading proponent of the “brand portfolio” or “house of brands” approach.

So by the time the presentation moved into its second half, I was already struggling with the speaker’s argument.  But, if anything, I found the second part even more difficult to understand.  First and foremost, I simply couldn’t understand how the separately-named, discretely-targeted, individually-promoted “propositions” that she spoke about were anything other than brands under another name.  OK, a bit like BMWs, they have fairly bland and generic sounding names, and their individual look and feel (including the typography) fits within the brand’s overall visual identity (as indeed do BMW’s).  But to say that as a result these things are not “brands” seems to me to make a complete nonsense of what the word “brand” actually means.

There was another aspect of this second part of the talk that bothered me, which was how on earth a huge global bank can respond to the needs of all of its customers with just five “propositions.”  Thinking about the range of things that the bank can do for just one customer - take, for the sake of argument, me - I’d have thought you’d have needed dozens of “propositions”, or whatever you want to call them, just to respond to my needs alone.

And in fact, it was pondering this apparently unsustainable idea - that five propositions can cover the entire global waterfront - that gave me a vague sense of a possible explanation for the whole presentation’s line of thought.

Like everyone addressing this kind of topic, the speaker had several slides designed to show us how, until quite recently, the approach to branding and sub-branding around the world had been chaotic, and not in a good way.  There was a huge amount of pointless, unnecessary and expensive complication, contradiction and duplication of resources.  Any cost-conscious senior manager looking at the slides showing the logos of literally hundreds of business unit, product and service sub-brands from all corners of the world would itch to cut a swathe through it all, creating order out of total chaos. 

And what’s the best way to tackle the problems of extreme complication?  To oppose them with an approach that’s based on extreme simplicity.  You’re not going to be able to dispose of the hundreds or even thousands of sub-brands championed by various groups of people in parts of the group by being nice, and reasonable, and suggesting that perhaps you should meet half-way.  You’re going to have to be completely unreasonable - you need to adopt a position that makes no sense, maintain complete and selective blindness to its obvious unsustainability and refuse to engage in any kind of discussion about it.

It seems the strategy has worked.  Worldwide, the bank has now discarded many, many hundreds of sub-brand identities (even though I don’t actually believe that it’s been able to replace them with just five “propositions.”)  Sometimes, in corporate life as elsewhere, it’s the unreasonable person who gets things done.  Fair enough.  But I must say, the unreasonable person may not be the best choice to make sense of it all in a conference presentation.

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Some very boring things are extraordinarily popular as Christmas gifts.   Among the items I’ve seen displayed in ads and shop windows over the last few weeks, the inevitable socks, saucepans, blank DVDs and security camera kits come to mind.

But among all the thousands of items offered for my consideration, I can’t think of a single one from the wonderful world of financial services.  No seasonally-wrapped and packaged financial products (OK, that does sound a bit unlikely) and not even any FS-linked Christmas collateral - snow-covered piggy banks, chocolate money presented in genuine cash bags.

This may sound like a stupid and trivial observation, and maybe it is.  But actually, I think it’s a bit more important than it seems.  I wrote very early in the lifetime of this blog about the way that financial institutions - even the most mainstream high street ones - never seem to find any opportunities to become part of day-to-day life, and, in particular, never succeed in engaging in any way with children.  As a result, I wrote, by the age of 12 or 13 or so, most kids have in their minds pretty fully-formed brand landscapes, including not just brands that are directly relevant to them but also many - even most - of the brands that are meaningful to their parents and close families.  But there’s one great big void, one unmapped continent - a chunk of the landscape which remains entirely featureless:  this is of course the land of financial services.

I accept that it’s difficult.  When it comes to engaging with, say, 9-12 year old girls, a long, long list of brands - Accessorise, Hello Kitty, Mac, Facebook, hundreds more - are better placed to make contact than Barclays and Halifax, let alone Legal & General and Standard Life.

But still, there must be some worthwhile ways that some of these institutions - especially the branch-based ones - could become more engaged with daily life.  Just concentrate on something as small and simple as ATM till receipts:  could they carry some really funny jokes?  Or some celebrity anecdotes?  Or an entry number for a prize draw?  Or a collectible set of images?  There must be a way to make them worth passing on to the kids. 

It seems that while the most successful consumer-facing organisations find more and more ways to become part of our lives - online service providers like Google, offline retailers like Tesco - financial institutions’ bandwidth gets narrower and narrower.  At the same time, many, of course, still spend fortunes on huge one-dimensional sponsorships..  If I was in charge of those budgets, I’d scrap the lot - and corner the Christmas chocolate money market.

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