No Small Change

CHAPTER 20How Far Can You See Beyond Financial Services?

In recent years, we've been pleased to see the gap slowly narrow between the world of financial services marketing, and the broader consumer marketing economy.

Once upon a time, the financial service world was not far from literally a different planet, populated by a different species and governed by different rules. As we mentioned a couple of hundred pages back, for example, some 50 years or so ago the advertising accounts of all the country's biggest banks were handled by the same agency (an agency, by the way, that handled financial accounts only), and by gentlemen's agreement the banks declined to make use of expensive television advertising as a form of competition. More recently, though, perhaps over 20 years or so, this other planet has been moving steadily closer to planet earth – a process clearly visible in the evolving career paths of many of the marketing professionals involved.

In the first stage of these journeys, a view spread across the financial services industry that it had much to learn from people involved in marketing fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG).¹ There was a time when anyone with a few years' brand management experience at Procters, Unilever or Diageo could expect to double their salary by moving into FS. This first surge of incomers didn't achieve very much, except to get approval for huge uplifts in advertising budgets that contributed enormously to ad agencies' income, profits and bonus ...