Lucian’s blog

As my eyesight fades, my brain becomes increasingly puzzled by what I think I’m seeing.  Looking at the departures board at Euston for details of my train to Manchester the other day, I thought it said “Toilet restrictions will apply on this train.”  I pondered for some time on the nature of these restrictions before I realised that it said “Ticket restrictions.”

Today, on the tube, I found myself opposite an ad in the Windows 7 campaign that I wrote about recently.  It showed a girl in a fashionably distressed urban environment, with a headline in inverted commas that seemed to tell us she was saying:  “I asked for fewer dicks. Now it takes fewer dicks. I’ve never been so influential.”  I pondered for some time on the nature of these dicks before I realised….well, you’re ahead of me.

Although they are, of course, a regrettable symptom of the ageing process, I’m quite enjoying these visual malapropisms, and I wonder what’ll be next.  Must be about time for a new movie from CLINT EASTWOOD. 

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You’ve seen the campaign - adshels, up at the moment, with a headline saying “What would you do with free texts for life?”, and a variety of pix of young people being interviewed in the street by a vox pop crew with captions telling us the things they’re saying, like “I’d stalk my maths teacher with porno texts every hour” and “I’d text my drug dealer on behalf of all my friends.”  (Actually, of course, they’re saying much duller things than this.)

Surrey Garland, probably the best writer I know, says the campaign’s rubbish - pointlessly complicated, much too much like hard work, hopeless, what on earth is the point of all that vox pop nonsense.  But I’m not so sure.

It’s true that there are certainly some technical problems.   The campaign is badly branded (actually, although I’ve stuck my neck out, I’m not 100% sure it is for T-Mobile).  And you can’t easily see what the vox popees are saying, although that doesn’t matter much because it’s all jolly dull.

But all the same, I still wonder if Surrey is wrong for once.  What is the number one lifestyle expectation of teenagers these days?  That they will be famous and will appear on television.  The subtext (or maybe subvisual) of this campaign is that when you buy into this new T-Mobile tariff, you become interesting enough to appear on television.  So far from being an unnecessary complication, I suspect this implicit communication is hugely compelling to its teenage target.Â

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Planning a conference speech for next week, I’ve been looking for examples of current FS campaigns that have clearly been created with the current economic climate in mind.

To my surprise, it’s very difficult to think of any.  OK, a few long-running campaigns which predated the crisis have been detoxed - Halifax staff are physically supporting their customers rather than prancing around in their beachwear, and NatWest now allegedly offers Helpful Banking rather than Another Way.  And back at the peak of the crisis, about a year ago, there was a brief flurry of “open letters” from various credit-crunched banks in the newspapers, which is the kind of thing organisations do when they think the situation they’re in demands some kind of communication, but not the fripperies and frivolities of advertising.

But apart from this, I found it impossible to think of any significant campaign which in any explicit way at all connects with the climate of fear and distrust that we’re living through.  Well, maybe just one - those ING Direct posters about how it’s good to be a sheep, which I wrote about a few months ago.

There are two possible explanations for this.  The first is that maybe all of us in financial marketing are still living in a bubble, still doggedly refusing to understand how completely our world has changed.  This is the kind of folly that could get me going on a full-throttle rant.

But before I light my blue touch-paper (what the hell is touch-paper?) I should consider the second possibility - that in fact there are quite a few climate-sensitive financial campaigns out there, but either my fading eyes have failed to see them or my fading brain has failed to remember them.  Just while I’m poised on the launch-pad, could you remind me if there’s anything I’ve overlooked or forgotten?

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This blog is on a reader recruitment drive.  It’s a feeble and one-dimensional one - I’m just asking you to mention it to one or two people you know who you think might appreciate it.

On the upside, in return I promise not to clutter up your life with unappealing incentives - no sets of cheap luggage, no carriage clocks, no digital Home Weather Stations. 

I would promise to update you on progress, but since this is the only blog in the world that’s still never got round to introducing any metrics to find out anything about its readers I’m afraid I can’t.

So, just to sum up, no incentive to take action, and no way to check whether you do or not.  It’s not the most powerful acquisition campaign ever, is it?

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I have a new, albeit temporary, favourite book - Marketing magazine’s “Little Black Book,” given away free with last week’s issue and acting as “the definitive guide to powerful marketers 2009.”

It includes brief biographical and personal details of about 250 senior client-side marketing people, and although the selection itself is pretty eccentric a lot of the details are riveting.

One of the best bits is the replies from the selected marketers when asked to describe themselves in just three words.  Two ideas stand out head and shoulders above the others.  The runner-up personality attribute, admittedly expressed in a number of different ways, is optimism:  the winner, by miles and always expressed in the same way, is passion.  I haven’t actually counted, but I would guess about 30% of the respondents choose this word.

I certainly do know, and have met, senior marketers who are clearly passionate about what they do - but not many:  I’d say closer to 3% than 30%.  The disparity raises a number of possibilities:

1. The respondents in the Little Black Book are kidding themselves, and aren’t very passionate at all;

2.  They are indeed passionate but in a weirdly understated and unnoticeable way;

3.  There aren’t anything like as many passionate marketers in financial services as there are in other areas;

4.  When they say they’re”passionate,” they’re not thinking about work;

5.  They think it’s what they ought to say, but they don’t really mean it.

I suppose it’s probably a bit of a combination of all the above.  And to be fair, it’s not really surprising or unusual:  when I run workshops with clients to define equivalent corporate characteristics like Brand Values and Brand Personality, there’s a small handful of Usual Suspects concepts - integrity, teamwork, innovation, quality, etc etc etc - that occupy about two-thirds of the available places.

It’s the other ones, though, that tend to stick in your mind and really do the job of defining and differentiating that these things are supposed to do.  I couldn’t tell you who in the Little Black Book claims to be “optimistic” or “passionate.”  But I distinctly remember the ones who used their three words to describe themselves as “Gary Neville lookalike,” “bald white male” and probably my favourite, “lucky, lucky bitch.”

I’m not kidding about the “favourite book” thing - I’ve been poring over this slim tome for days, and I suspect I may come back for some more statistical analysis in forthcoming blogs.  Bet you can’t wait.�

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Watching the TV news pictures of so-called wildcat (why “wildcat”?) strikers protesting about the decision of the oil company Total to choose Italian and Portuguese workers, rather than British ones, to build an extension to their Lincolnshire refinery, I can’t help contrasting their sense of outrage and determination to get the decision reversed with the supine passivity of the middle classes.

The fact is, over the last year or two thousands of times more people have lost billions of pounds more money as a result of various aspects of the credit crunch.  Stock market falls have slaughtered the value of pension savings.  Firms switching from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions have cast thunderous clouds over the retirement prospects of millions of employees.  Huge reductions in interest rates have brought about an enormous transfer of spending power from savers to borrowers.  And of course some either have already lost, or will eventually lose, large chunks of their money in particular crises and scandals like the collapse of the offshore branches of Icelandic banks and the failure of badly-regulated hedge funds.

Yet amidst the carnage, there’s no sign of any level of protest beyond the careful crafting of disgruntled letters to the editor of the Daily Telegraph.   No taking to the streets or manning of barricades;  no protesters in Parliament Square;  no marches up and down Park Lane;  no uplift in IKEA brazier sales.

This is surely a mistake, not least because visible (which means physical) protest works.  Indeed, the evidence on the news this morning is that probably as a result of behind-the-scenes pressure from an anxious government, Total are already rethinking their preference for Souther European workers. 

Admittedly it is bloody cold at the moment.  Perhaps we’re all just waiting for the coming of spring.  Or maybe for Delia or Gordon or someone to tell us how to prepare osso bucco on a brazier.  But actually, I think it’s a lack of courage and commitment.  And until that changes, we’re all going to keep getting screwed.Â

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Peter Mandelson’s new plan to re-invent National Girobank is exciting.  If the State is going to own half the retail banking sector by accident, it may as well own another chunk of it on purpose.

But one thing that has changed, and not for the better, since the Government decided to put the banking services available through the Post Office into the hands of Allied Irsh Bank, is the length of the queues.

At my local post offices in Camden and Tufnell Park, the average queuing time is between 30 and 60 minutes.  What would happen if you added in a successful and popular banking service to all the other things that people are grimly waiting for doesn’t bear thinking about.

With any luck it’ll be an unsucessful and unpopular service, so it won’t make much difference.

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It’s the current financial services industry meltdown that’s doing it.  What it’s calling to mind is that sequence - anyone who’s ever watched National Geographic channel has seen it hundreds of times - of the pack of predators, lions, jackals, whatever, tracking the huge herd of wildebeest, and looking for the weak or lame one that somehow gets detached from the herd.  And we all know what the jackals do to the weakest wildebeest, don’t we.

Northern Rock was the first weakest wildebeest.  So far, the others have included Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley and now HBOS.  (A few of these, admittedly, have adopted a survival strategy not as far as I know often adopted by wildebeest, which is to go and hide amongst a family group of friendly elephants - Santander elephants in Alliance & Leicester’s case, Bank of America ones in Merrill’s.) 

The troubling thing about this analogy is that as that herd of wildebeest makes its way across the dusty plain, and as the predators continue to prowl, the point I can’t get out of my mind is simply this:  there is always a weakest wildebeest.

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Over thirty years on, one of the few things about Fawlty Towers that has definitely dated is the way Basil treats Manuel.  I suppose it’s not exactly racist - I don’t think Catalonians represent a distinct racial group.  But when we complain about the unquestionably racist behaviour of Spanish football and motor racng fans today, it’s worth remembering how contemptuously our most brilliant comedian felt able to treat a Spanish character a generation or so ago.

The thing is, though, racist or not, when you think about our recent experience of Spanish service industries, you can’t help thinking Basil had a point.  All my personal-finance-journalist friends tell me that even by the standards of mass-market retail banking, which aren’t exactly high, the behaviour of Santander-owned Abbey towards its customers is jaw-droppingly bad.  As a frequent flyer in recent years, I am quite certain that I have never in all my life dealt with a service company as cynical and useless as Ferrovial-owned BAA.  And by far the longest, bitterest and most difficult battle I’ve ever fought with a company trying to get compensation for a complete service collapse (successfully, in the end) was with Spain’s national airline, Iberia.

Even three swallows don’t make a summer, and I’m sure there are lots of Spanish service businesses doing a great job for British customers.  It’s just that like Basil Fawlty, I have to say that my own experience has been totally rubbish.

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It’s not just Alastair Darling saying these could be the worst economic conditions for 60 years.  It’s also the Money section in yesterday’s Sunday Times.  Which passed a particularly bleak milestone:  it contained, surely for the first time, more ads for Sunday Times and Times special offers of one sort or another than it did for financial products.

Newspaper offer ads are what the papers run to fill in the odd unexpected gap between proper paying advertisers.  For them to outnumber the paying customers is like, I don’t know, a High Street with more rent-free charity shops than proper rent-paying retailers.  Or a theatre where the friends and relations on complimentary tickets outnumber the paying customers.  Or an agency where there are more kids doing work experience than there are proper grown-up members of staff (which, I must admit, is sometimes rather how it seems here during the peak of the holiday season).  Anyway, it isn’t good.  Not good at all.

On a completely different note, I was too bearish about the prospects for Tottenham at Chelsea yesterday.  Our new keeper looks terrific, and our defence was most un-Spurs-like in its solidity:  admittedly our midfield and attack didn’t have much to offer, but we were still very decent value for the draw.   Maybe the recession isn’t going to be as bad as I fear either.

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