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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It was back in 1840, with the launch of a postal service that promised to deliver a letter anywhere in the country for a penny, that the first of this country’s social media really took off.

As the volume of private correspondence grew at an astonishing rate, the new phenomenon gave advertisers plenty to think about.  Organisations that had happily confined their media selections to newspapers and stage-coach seatbacks quickly came under pressure:  did they have a social media strategy?  What were they doing to make the most of the post?

At first, I suspect, the aim may well have been to persuade letter-writers to take on the additional role of delivering advertising messages.  This must have seemed an extremely attractive option to the advertisers, not least because it wouldn’t cost them anything.  If they could provide letter-writers with amusing “viral” content about Pears Soap or Beecham’s Pills or whatever early Victorian brands existed in those distant days, then the word would spread like wildfire among the corresponding classes - while, most wonderfully, budgets could be slashed to the bone.

In the event, the experience of the following 170 years shows that it didn’t really work out quite like that.  Letter-writers carried on writing letters to each other, or at least until the technology was successively superseded by phone, email and text.  But they never really made more than the odd passing comment about Pears Soap or Beecham’s Pills:  irritatingly, they preferred to write and read about things that actually mattered to them, rather than things that mattered to an advertiser with a social media strategy.

Which didn’t at all mean that advertisers failed to find their own uses for this powerful new medium.  They did.  From the Victorian age to the present day, they’ve poured billions and billions of pounds into their own, parallel stream of commercial correspondence, and often their activities have achieved excellent results for them.

But for those who now believe that smart advertisers can encroach seamlessly and organically into today’s generation of social media, enjoyed and appreciated by users and integrated enthusiastically into their own personal communications, it must be a bit depressing to remember that over the years, the medium invented by their predecessors has invariably become known as “junk mail.”

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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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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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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.

Read more | Posted in Agencies, Brand, Internet | 5 Comments »

Honest, guv, I love change, me - I mean, even within the last year or so I’ve started wearing socks with coloured toes and heels.

Still, the truth is, much as I may sing its praises to clients, most of the time it makes me as twitchy as anyone else.  Especially when it affects my blog, as it does now.

If you’ve been used to accessing this blog through www.tangible-financial.co.uk, you’ll have to find another way, because www.tangible-financial.co.uk doesn’t exist any more.

The change-averse among you can continue to get to it via www.luciancampconsulting.com; those poised half-way between traditionalism and modernity can find it on my LinkedIn page;  and novelty seekers will find that as of today, you can get there via a new web address, www.tangible-london.co.uk.  So there are still plenty of ways of getting here.

But the one which I’ve always used myself, and I suspect that a high proportion of readers have too, doesn’t work any more.  Which means that whoever you are, the chances are that you’re not reading this. 

Not much point in continuing to write it, then.Â

Read more | Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »

Not so long ago, the love affair between providers of regulated products and IFAs looked as deep and long-lasting as ever.  But when you start falling a bit out of love, you quickly fall a lot out of love.  And while providers and advisers may still look like the perfect couple to the outside world, I wonder more than a little about what’s actually going on between them behind closed doors.

What’s changed?  Well, as so often in tales of fading love, a third party has come between them.  In this case, of course, it’s the FSA and its Retail Distribution Review.  In launching this initiative - and, most of all, in sounding the death-knell for provider-determined remuneration - I don’t think the regulator intended to drive a wedge between providers and advisers:  the aim was only to drive them towards behaving in a more civilised manner towards the public.  But the FSA seems to be able to do very little without triggering off an avalanche of unintended consequences, and RDR is no exception.

The trouble is, RDR has got both parties thinking.  Advisers have started thinking rather unsentimentally that if life and investment companies aren’t going to be able to go on rewarding them so richly for their continuing devotion with large lumps of initial commission, there really isn’t any very compelling reason to put up with them any longer.  Nine times out of ten, there’s a perfectly viable alternative - usually a tax wrapper provided by a platform, stuffed with ETFs or virtually-no-charge index funds as an investment solution.  And actually, since putting that together looks cleverer and more complicated than buying an insurance company’s pre-packaged product, it may even be that under Adviser Charging, an IFA can actually justify a higher fee to his client.

Meanwhile,  providers have started thinking much more anxiously that without access to the control mechanism of commission, their ability to get the outcomes they want from advisers will become similar to the ability of an airline pilot to get the outcome he wants from his plane without access to a joystick.  Yes, you can design and promote sexy new products;  yes, you can build strong relationships;  yes, maybe, you can even do something about your diabolical service standards.  But unless you can offer products which either permanently (eg investment bonds) or temporarily (eg any product on price promotion) offer advisers more dosh than the alternatives, how can you actually be sure they’ll come through with the sales volumes you’re looking for?

It’s this prospect of a loss of control (or, to put it another way, the prospect of a world in which advisers actually choose products because they’re good, rather than because they pay more) which frightens providers so badly.   It’ll be very interesting to see, for example, how many investment advisers carry on recommending high-cost, poorly-performing actively managed funds over ETFs and index funds when they have no financial incentive to do so:  if I was running a firm making most of its money out of charging 3% up front and 1.5% per annum for the services of active fund managers delivering consistently below-average performance, I’d be pretty anxious too.

While advisers, therefore, consider the extraordinary possibility of doing a better job for their clients, providers look for target markets too ignorant to resist overcharging.  A few firms have found some excellent options overseas:  I speak from profound ignorance and I vigorously apologise if I’m wrong about this, but I’m told that Prudential, to name but one, is able to maintain margins on sales in the developing world at a level we haven’t seen in this country for 30 years or more.  But these days, the large majority of firms are looking much closer to home:  the Internet offers lovely low-cost access to millions and millions of consumers who have no idea that 2% p.a. is an absurd amount to pay for any fund manager who isn’t Anthony Bolton or Neil Woodford.

This is good for me, I suppose, provided I don’t lose too much sleep over the value for money question.  Among our clients and prospects, the balance between those focusing on intermediated and on direct channels has changed dramatically over the course of the year.   Is it good for consumers?  Not sure.  The FSA is certainly right that on the whole - with many admirable exceptions - the broad mass of consumers have been horribly badly served by the outgoing tied and independent advice regime of the last 20-odd years.  I wish I felt that on the whole - leaving aside more affluent people who I hope and probably believe will be better served by post-RDR advisers - the broad mass will be better served by the incoming provider-owned distribution regime.

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As a small boy (a difficult concept for those who know me now as a far-from-small bloke) I didn’t much like going to other children’s birthday parties.  When it was time to go, my mother would find me in my bedroom, dressed in little bow tie and polished sandals, white-faced, upper lip trembling, and maintaining a vice-like grip on bedpost, bookcase or radiator.

As she gently unprised my fingers, she always said the same thing:  “Don’t worry, you’ll like it when you get there.”  And she was usually right.

Tomorrow I’m off to Harrogate for the Building Societies Association conference, and it’s probably just as well that there isn’t a radiator or bedpost in this office.  I am rather dreading it.  Nothing personal:  just that the poor old building society movement does seem, if the papers are to be believed, to be in the direst of dire straits.

If I say it myself (which, obviously, I do), I have a brilliant presentation for them.  It’s all about new ways that building societies can use the Internet to develop their businesses.  But I have a terrible feeling that in what I fear will be a deeply downbeat atmosphere, it’ll strike completely the wrong note - a bit like turning up to sell long-term regular savings plans to prisoners on Death Row.  What’s more, it’s a two-hour session, so if it becomes clear after the first couple of slides that my own personal zeitgeist is the diametrical opposite of theirs, it’ll be a long haul through to Summary & Conclusions.

Oh well.  I know what my mother would say.  And maybe, just maybe, she’ll be proved right again.

Now, where are that bow tie and those polished sandals?�

Read more | Posted in Financial, Internet | 1 Comment »

This blog - and indeed the two websites to which it’s linked, Tangible Financial and Lucian Camp Consulting - share a most unusual characteristic:  none of them is linked to any metrics or analytics that tell us anything about who’s visiting, or what they do when they get here.

Why not?  Well, not for any good reason really.  It’s just Cobbler’s Children again.  That, and I suppose maybe just a little bit of not wanting to know - I’m happy enough making jokes about “both my readers,” but I suppose that if I knew there really were only two,  I might seriously lose the will to live, or at least keep this going.

Still.  In much the same way that before too long some kind of cable is bound to be put in place to connect the French roadside camera network to the UK roadside camera network so that I won’t be able to going bombing past French cameras a une vitesse formidable, I don’t suppose that you’ll be able to carry on visiting this blog indefinitely without getting follow-up calls from enthusiastic business development people, especially if your email address ends “@barclays.com” or “@landg.com” or something similar.

But don’t worry - I’ll let you know as and when your cloak of invisibility is penetrated by cunning Google software.  For the time being, not a soul knows you’re here.

Read more | Posted in Internet, Ramblings | 1 Comment »

Before it all goes cloudy again, let me share a thought with you.  I’ve said loads of times that one of the very weirdest things about the financial services market (by which I means pretty much every major sector within retail finance except High Street banking and direct insurance) is that hardly anyone is remotely interested in selling products and services to the mass market - that is, to consumers on, a bit below or a bit above average incomes.

And I’ve also said loads of times that the reasons for this bizarre and as far as I can see unique state of affairs are clear, well-understood and compelling:  the commercial logic simply doesn’t stack up.  The cost of providing products and services to these consumers is too high, and the amount of money that can be creamed off from their modest financial resources in fees and commissions is too low.

But here’s the new bit, or new to me at any rate:  it may be that just now, all the elements in that commercial logic stand on the brink of change.  A combination of factors, including first and foremost the relentless advance of the internet in both power and consumer take-up, is driving down the cost of reaching into the mass market.  And if - as I think very likely - the change in the zeitgeist from ravenous greed to starey-eyed fear makes people think that perhaps, on second thoughts, a bit more by way of savings and investments and insurance and so forth might not be such a bad idea, then the revenue potential from dealing with mass market consumers might start increasing just at the point that the costs start to fall.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not imagining an overnight transformation here.  But it may be that the eerily-deserted mass market for financial advice, products and services will gradually become a bit more populated.

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