Lucian’s blog

Checking out a footnote in a recent magazine article, I found my way to a Harvard Business Review article published in 2007 called “Companies and the customers who hate them.”

I have a nasty feeling that I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t already discovered it.  But just in case you haven’t seen it either, here’s a link:  http://www.slideshare.net/grapplica/companies-and-the-customers-who-hate-them.

Anyway, it’s brilliant.  Basically, it lays into all sorts of service companies - telecoms, utilities, financial services - for making their deliberate strategy of making their biggest profits out of the customers who make the worst purchases from them.  It says that such companies have a mind-set  which is to do with “extracting value” from customers rather than “adding value” to their dealings with them - and that eventually this approach must rebound on companies and bring about their own destruction.

Let’s face it, there are hundreds of examples of this kind of behaviour in financial services, but the sort of thing we’re talking about is the sort of little drama that’s blown up in the ISA market recently to do with the millions of customers who’ve been lured in by short-term promotional rates and now find they’re enjoying their ISA tax benefits on a product that’s now paying them 0.1% p.a.  But you could equally well choose Payment Protection Insurance, or credit cards’ order-of-payment policies, or overseas payments made in sterling at preposterous exchange rates, or hidden charges buried deep in investment funds’ TERs, or….well, as I say, you could choose hundreds of things.

In FSA jargon, all this is primarily the result of “information assymetry.”  The FSA’s perception is that consumers suffer because they’re too stupid and disengaged to understand what’s happening to them, so in the long run the only solution is to increase their “financial capability” until they become canny enough to resist.

Reading the article, you start by feeling a jolt of recognition at the precision with which some of our industry’s worst habits and behaviours are filleted and skewered;  but then, instead of feeling mildly contemptuous to consumers who are silly enough to fall for our innumerable tricks, you go on to feel a cold rage towards all those in the industry playing their part in carrying on like this.

It seems to me that it’s just not good enough to blame consumers for what happens to them.  Forgive me if the analogy’s in bad taste, but it does seem to me to be a response not dissimilar to blaming a woman in a short skirt for being raped:  I think we generally understand now that the blame for rape lies with the rapist and not with the victim.

There are two questions you have to ask yourself.  First, although the authors are clearly and devastatingly right in their analysis of what’s happening, are they equally right about what they claim are the inevitable consequences (i.e. that sooner or later consumers will become so angered about their treatment that they’ll desert the companies concerned in droves)?  And second, insofar as all of us working in financial services marketing are playing our own parts in this shoddy behaviour, how long are we willing to carry on doing so without complaint or protest?

Still not easy to answer the former.  Consumers may be getting angrier and angrier, and they may be hating their mistreatment more and more.  On the whole, though, the depressing reality seems to be that they grumble but stay put, very likely on the basis that in financial services they don’t believe things will be any better anywhere else.  If the internet generations turn out to be a little less inert, or indeed more ert, then I’ll be delighted.

As for the latter, I guess we can only answer that question for ourselves as individuals.  Speaking for myself, this little bleat of protest should be taken as a sign that - continuing the goaty analogy - I’m getting towards the end of my tether.

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I can’t think when I last set foot in a bank.  And it’s even longer since I set foot in my own bank - so long, in fact, that in writing this I had to pause for a minute to remind myself where it actually is.

Being that kind of customer, you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve been a bit mystified by the industry’s recent surge of enthusiasm for branch banking. The papers are full of the plans of all sorts of institutions and consortiums to acquire large numbers of branches from big existing players like RBS and, I think, Lloyds Banking Group.  And considering the extremely limited scope of his immediate plans, my old friend Anthony Thomson has done incredibly well to make the forthcoming launch of his very branch-based new operation, Metro Bank, sound like the Big Four are about to become the Big 5.

Still, as I say, from a personal point of view, all this stuff about re-emphasising the role of the branch as the cornerstone of the customer relationship has all been sounding like sentimental nonsense to me - or, worse, like a rather poor-quality smokescreen intended to obfuscate the reality of the situation, which is that the moment you enter one of their sodding branches you’ll be manacled to a comfy sofa and not allowed to get up until you’ve agreed to buy a bucketful of stupid useless payment protection insurance.

As I say, that’s what I thought.  Until I heard Anthony Thomson himself tell a story about the success of Metro Bank’s US-based role model, Commerce Bank.  In America, he explained, Commerce Bank branches are mainly located in suburban residential areas, and open long hours seven days a week.  And one of the most successful parts of their re-invention of the role of the branch has been to give every customer a safe deposit box.  Why?  Because thousands of female customers owning expensive jewellery keep it in their safe deposit boxes;  drop in on a Saturday afternoon to pick up the items they want to wear that evening;  and then drop back in on Sunday morning to put their rocks back in their box.

Admittedly a Sunday morning image involving swarms of robbers with swag bags and stripey jumpers hovering outside Commerce Bank branches waiting to pounce on the ice-laden suburbanites does come briefly to mind, but actually the truth is that when I hear this example, I do have a lightbulb moment.  If a bank branch could make itself useful to me (or indeed to Mrs Camp) in this and maybe half a dozen similar ways, then, yes, I can imagine that much to my surprise a) the branch could become the focal point of the bank’s relationships, and b), as a result, the branch could indeed play a crucial role in enabling the bank to recruit and retain customers.

But “maybe half a dozen similar ways” - now, there’s the rub.  I’ve only heard two other less good examples from Metro Bank:  every branch will have loos (tempting, though a bit unfair, to call these a hygiene factor), and also a coin-sorting machine for the pennies and twopences in my candy jar (useful once every two years when the jar gets full).   One good idea and two much less good ones aren’t enough to make me re-evaluate my views about the role of branches.  But another four or five really good ones, and it could be a different story.

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I know, I’ve been here before, but I have a new angle.  Dropped in to Tesco Metro on Camden Road on the way home last night, fighting my way in, as usual, past the huge Krispy Kreme donut stand that blocks the route into the store a couple of feet back from the doorway.  And realised, not for the first time, what a dietary nightmare Tesco Metro actually is.

True, there’s a reasonable selection of fresh fruit and veg, laid out modestly in an aisle towards one end of the store.  But that’s not where it’s at, or indeed where the customers are at.  Apart from the Krispy Kremes, where the customers are at is around the huge displays of carbonated drinks, the whole aisle devoted to crisps, the cakes and buns in the large instore bakery, the takeaway pies, sausage rolls and sandwiches, the bucketloads of cheap booze and, inescapably, the long queuing track up to the checkouts which takes you past more carbonated drinks, mountains of discounted confectionery (and, to nourish the inner person, piles of slebmags fronting pics of Cheryl Cole).

Tesco, of course, knows its market very well, and I’m sure that amid all these empty calories almost all its customers find what they’re looking for.  (It’s only when a foodie twit like me turns up looking for fresh coriander and burghul that disappointment is guaranteed.)

But the thing is, Tesco picks up little or no flak for the fact that the store is single-mindedly focused on giving its customers what they want, not for a moment considering what they might need.

It’s not a trivial matter.  You see morbidly obese people staggering round the store with baskets stuffed with donuts and special offer Doritos, and you wonder whether they’ll actually make it home before they have the heart attack.  And as you get your phone out of your pocket just in case an ambulance is needed urgently, you ask yourself whether, as and when it happens, Tesco has any responsibility for the situation.

If you ask most people - if you ask Society At Large, whatever that may be - the answer is clearly “no.”  Which is funny, because if you ask the equivalent question about financial services providers and toxic financial products, the answer is clearly “yes.”

Since financial fashions change, it’s difficult to imagine exactly what would be on display in a similarly toxic financial services shop.  Some years ago, where the Krispy Kremes stand in Tesco, there’d have been a tottering tower of tech funds.  During the credit boom, there’d have been yards of cheap self-cert remortgages, and credit cards offering short interest-free periods and rates six or seven times base rate thereafter.  There’d be precipice bonds, the financial services industry’s equivalent of Haagen Dazs ice cream - a delicious short-term sense of wellbeing, followed by an anguished realisation of the long-term damage done.  And on the way to the check-out, what else but a big, bold special offer on super-sub-prime mortgages, offering the local social housing community an easy, affordable way into….medium term financial ruin.

Yes, in the same aisle where Tesco put the fresh fruit and veg, there’d be a modest selection of ISAs, Child Trust Funds, protection products and so forth.  But very few shoppers would venture into it, and most of the buyers would surely come from the comfortable middle classes.

Of course none of this could ever happen.  Unlike Tesco, the financial services industry is believed by everyone - including itself - to have a responsibility to sell to needs rather than to wants.

But where this gets a bit complicated is that as any good salesman knows, it isn’t difficult to dress up what are actually wants so that they look extraordinarily similar to needs.   During the last decade we all heard the argument, for example, that people with poor credit histories need access to the mortgage market, and so the industry is doing the right thing by providing them with appropriately risk-priced loans.   Or, back at the turn of the millennium, that retail investors need the same kind of access as institutional investors to the fastest-growing sectors of the stock market even when those sectors are populated by small, illiquid companies often listed on secondary or tertiary markets, so it’s appropriate to offer them packaged, high-cost tech funds which allow them to run risks they have no idea they’re running.

As a result, even though pretty much everyone in and around the industry would strongly agree that Tesco-style toxic tactics are totally inappropriate, the reality is that over the years our behaviour hasn’t been all that different.

It may be that as seems quite often to be the case in this country, the current rather dishonest compromise is the best available option.  Allowing the hedonist tendency to swing the pendulum the full way over towards “wants” is surely inconceivable.  But equally, putting the Calvinists in complete control and going balls-out for unmitigated needs doesn’t sound like the best idea ever, not least because it would take the remaining traces of consumer interest and enthusiasm out of an industry that desperately needs more, not less, of both.

Pondering this dilemma, one’s inclined to ask oneself what Tesco themselves would do in the circumstances.  Judging from current reports about the way they’re working behind the scenes to build up their financial services business for a major and imminent relaunch, we may be about to find out.

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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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Remember Neil Kinnock’s spine-tingling anti-Thatcher speech?  “I warn you not to be old…I warn you not to be ill…I warn you not to be poor”?

In the somewhat unlikely event that instead of having a pop at that barmy old bat he was actually advising you on how to get a half-decent level of service out of today’s major financial services providers, then rather than age, infirmity or poverty, I think he’d be warning you mainly against being in any way odd or different.

The trouble is, the systems just can’t cope.  They can barely deal with totally straightforward vanilla transactions.  But as soon as it gets in the slightest bit tutti frutti, then it all falls over.

I could tell you all about the desperate efforts of my wife and my father-in-law to re-invest the proceeds of his maturing Santander fixed-term investment.  I won’t, because I promised long ago never to try your patience with these dull personal sagas.  I’ll say only three things.

1.  To give themselves any chance at all of a satisfactory outcome, my wife is having to make two trips from London to Swindon to visit the branch in person.

2.  The whole experience has been just as deeply frustrating for the branch staff, grappling with a hopeless computer system, than it has been for Judy and my father-in-law - in fact, Judy says, on her last trip to Swindon it was the woman in the branch trying to sort it out who was on the verge of tears, not Judy.  Or indeed her father.

3.  For all this travelling and emoting, it doesn’t look as if there will be a satisfactory option in place when the existing investment matures in a few days, and if that’s the case then my father in law says he will end a relationship, originally with Abbey National, that goes back over 60 years.

What’s at the bottom of this?  In a word, crappy old computers.   (OK, in three words.)  Two of the businesses Santander now owns, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester, were, as I recall, legendary for the complexity and antiquity of their systems.  Now they’re all being crunched together, with Bradford & Bingley thrown in for good measure, I can imagine it’s like trying to establish clear communications between three separate towers of Babel.

With jets of steam hissing from the pipework and plenty of staff digits thrust into digital dykes, the organisation can just about cope with clearing a cheque.  But as soon as you want to do anything a little bit different or complicated, well, boy, are you asking for it. We’re talking meltdown - not just of a load of 70s mainframes, but also of all human beings, staff or customers, within a 50ft radius.

What’s interesting is that as far as I know, there’s nowhere that we can check up on this.  There are lots of places, on and offline, where we can compare product features, interest rates and charges.  But I’m not aware of anyone who can tell us which institutions’ systems stand, at any moment, closest to complete collapse.

Common sense tells me that generally speaking, younger and simpler organisations will have newer computers and more fit-for-purpose software than old, complicated organisations.  (Unfairly, even though that’s generally true, they can also suffer from particularly tricky glitches:  poor old Judy, again, is dealing with one insurance company which has a clever and I think unique way of allocating individual members of staff to each customer as a personal relationship manager, which is a good and positive idea until that individual member of staff is unavailable, which for one reason or another he or she usually is.  At this point, someone else who knows nothing about your case and cares less picks up the phone and - again if you want anything remotely difficult or complicated - proceeds to screw everything up.  Once this has happened three or four times, your file has become so corrupted that it would be much, much easier to close your account and start again with a blank sheet of paper and an empty file elsewhere.)

Anyway.  Think of this not so much as a tiresome personal rant, but more as free and useful advice for anyone wanting to get one step ahead in the comparison site game.  For customers presenting with any kind of oddness or complexity, how likely is the system to fall over?   You could express the answer on the 10-point LORJTTOF scale -  Likelihoof Of Reducing Judy To Tears Of Frustration.

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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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I’ve written more than once before now about the knock-on effects of Aleksandr the Meerkat, and the way that he’s had all the other major price comparison sites rushing about like headless chickens looking for campaign ideas of their own that can create as much engagement as he does.

With the three biggest rivals now well into their own meerkat-fighting responses, the dust has now settled and we can see how things have turned out.

There are in fact no headless chickens - the closest that we had, the call-centre chickens in Swiftcover’s “no clucking call-centres” campaign were replaced some while ago, in an unexpected move, by Iggy Pop.

But elsewhere, to sum up, GoCompare’s GioCompario campaign is absolutely horrible, but probably reasonably effective;  Moneysupermarket’s Omid Djalili campaign is solid and reasonably likeable, but suffers from cripplingly weak brand attribution;  and Confused.com’s “save a pair of jeans” campaign is a total misfire, not making sense at any level.

All in all, the meerkat’s supremacy remains unchallenged, although as I’ve also written before on this blog it’s a bit disappointing, considering just how supreme he does remain, to find that in fact comparethemarket.com is still only the No.4 price comparison site, with a market share less than a quarter of Moneysupermarket’s and less than half of GoCompare’s and Confused.com’s.

Framing an agency pitch brief, or indeed an agency pitch, purely as a response to a single named competitor is, of course, a recipe for disaster.  All that happens is that people’s frame of reference shrinks down to a single focus, so that they lose all sense of what an idea’s overall strengths and weaknesses may be and see it only in terms of how it compares to what that named competitor is doing.

You’ve heard me mention the example of Direct Line before, and the way that I personally have been briefed at least a dozen times over the years - maybe more like two dozen - to come up with an equivalent of that wretched red phone on wheels.   Over the years, there has been one surprisingly effective outcome from this brief - Churchill’s nodding back-shelf dog - but also a lot of toe-curling misfires (Admiral’s admiral, Elephant’s elephant, Hastings’s warrior, eSure’s mouse, Lombard Direct’s blue phone etc etc).

It’s funny the way that sometimes, a campaign from one brand in a category defines the catgeory so perfectly that whether they want to or not, its competitor brands can’t help thinking of it as the benchmark against which their own efforts must be measured.  I can remember this happening in health insurance with BUPA’s “You’re Amazing” campaign;  in credit cards with Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign;  in roadside resue with the AA’s “4th Emergency Service;” and, longer ago, with great classics like Heineken’s “refreshes the parts” and Benson & Hedges’ surreal gold pack shots.

For these benchmarking-setting campaigns, this situation represents a double victory - success in their own right, and a copycat obsession that dooms rivals to failure.  And to the list above, it seems we can now add comparethemarket.com - both for its success in its own right, and for that damaging copymeerkat obsession that it’s set off among its rivals.

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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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There’s a campaign running at the moment for the stockbrokers (or wealth managers, as they probably call themselves these days) Brewin Dolphin.  Executionally it’s not bad, in a classy-but-somewhat-dull-and-recessive way.  But it’s the proposition that bothers me.

Basically, all the ads are all about the huge amount of time and effort that the company wants to put into getting to know me before it starts doing any wealth managing on my behalf.  To me, I have to say, this is a proposition that seems unwelcome and unnecessary in equal measure.

I’m a very busy person with far too many meetings in my diary and a poor work/life balance.  Sitting down for interminable getting-to-know-you sessions with a pinstriped Rupert is just about my last idea of fun. 

But I suppose I’d be reluctantly willing if I could imagine what on earth is likely to emerge from these discussions.  My investment needs can be summed up in 30 seconds:  over the years I haven’t put away enough for my retirement, and therefore a) I’m keen that my money should grow as much as possible to make up the deficit, but b) I can’t afford to lose a lot of it trying.  (The fact that these two requirements are entirely incompatible is basically the challenge for any chosen wealth manager to rise to.)

In having these rather contradictory needs, I have no doubt that I’m typical of thousands of other people, and therefore that the investment solution that’ll suit me best will be the same as thousands of other people’s.  Rupert can chat away with me for as long as he likes, but I don’t think he’s going to find anything more interesting or distinctive to inform my investment brief.  In fact, I can’t really imagine what interesting or distinctive discoveries there could be.  I suppose maybe a commitment to ethical investing, say.  Or, I don’t know, some personal history that leads to a profound reluctance to invest in Korea.  But even if I did possess some personal idiosyncracies of this kind, I’m sure they’d emerge in 15 minutes.  I can’t envisage Rupert triumphantly dragging them to the surface two hours into our eighth working session, like an angler finally landing the one trout from the pond.

This issue - the sheer routine ordinariness of most of our financial needs - seems to me to raise a big issue not just with this one slightly second-rate advertising campaign, but also with very large parts of the whole world of “wealth management” and financial advice.  Yes, certainly, a few very rich people with complicated personal lives do need sophisticated strategies to minimise tax, keep money out of the hands of ex-spouses and so forth.  But for the huge majority of us, it’s all childishly simple - and the only real dilemmas are ones that no adviser can solve for us anyway, like for example given the inadequacy of our resources is it better to underfund our pensions, our life assurance or our short term savings.

As I’ve written before in this blog, the only reason why most of us need all this tiresome and expensive individual service is that the whole industry has been built to be operated like that.  Like a restaurant without a self-service counter, which would surely degenerate into chaos if all the diners turned up in the kitchen demanding their chosen dishes directly from the chefs, it can’t currently work in any other way.  But spend a bit of time and money on building a decent self-service counter and it’s a different story:  and if a chef with a proper palate flinches at the sight of customers spooning parmesan onto their spaghetti vongole, it doesn’t really matter and no-one’s going to die.

I suppose that in the end, like about two-thirds of the entries in this blog, the point is ultimately no more and no less interesting than a single three-word observation:  all markets segment.   For everyone who, like me, is mystified and alienated by Brewin Dolphin’s advertising, there’s someone else who can’t wait to book up those interminable meetings.  And, as I’ve said myself a million times, it’s better to turn on 20% of your market and turn off 80% than to be greeted with indifference by the whole lot of them.

Still, if a wealth manager wants a positive response from me to an advertising campaign, they’d do much better to emphasise how little they want to talk to me.

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