No Small Change

CHAPTER 1About This Book

Everything in this book is based around a single central idea: that in a consumer economy like ours, good marketing is good for consumers, companies and society as a whole.

We'll define and describe what we mean by marketing, and specifically good marketing, in much more detail further on in this book. It's important to be clear about this – of all the terms commonly used in business, there can't be many with a broader, less precise and less consistent range of meanings. For the time being, let's just say that at a high level marketing helps with figuring out what consumers want or need, and then finding ways that organisations can successfully provide products or services that satisfy those wants and needs while meeting their own goals.

On this basis, it seems clear to us that good marketing, in financial services as elsewhere, is a good thing. It results in products, services and experiences which please and satisfy consumers, which they perceive to offer them good value (a concept we'll discuss later), which offer a profitable and sustainable future for the companies providing them and which generate economic activities that benefit society as a whole.

All of which makes it particularly regrettable that in financial services, unlike many other parts of the consumer economy, we've seen little good marketing over the years. There has been a growing amount of not-very-good marketing – much of it simply ineffective, but a good deal of it actually bad ...