No Small Change

CHAPTER 17Call That a Brand?

Of all the subjects that have baffled and bamboozled the financial services marketing community over the years, none has created bafflement remotely to compare with the issue of brands and how you build them.

To put the simplest of financial measures on the scale of the problem, over the past 20 years retail financial services firms in the UK have spent at least £5 billion, and arguably a great deal more, on activities specifically intended to help them build strong brands in their marketplace. Yet 20 years on, if we look at all the biggest firms in all the biggest sectors of the market, we find that consumers are almost completely unable to distinguish between them – and when they can, it's usually for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the branding efforts. Often, in fact, the perceptions they have are precisely the perceptions the expenditure was intended to overcome.

Of all the money that the financial services industry has spent over that kind of period, it's extremely difficult to think of an equivalent sum that has achieved so spectacularly little. You could hardly believe that such a lot of money could deliver such meagre results, and you can only conclude that there must be something – or more likely quite a few things – horribly wrong in the thinking that has shaped the spending of it.

This is bad for the industry, but it's also bad for consumers. Especially in markets that they don't understand well – and where levels of engagement ...