The beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? Why the work of brand building in financial services has only just begun

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.

The other day, I took part in an online debate with my old friend and former colleague Christopher Brooks, CEO of customer experience firm Lexden, on the subject of whether brand is more important than experience in establishing customer preference.

To be honest, it’s a bit of a silly question.  Customer experience is – or at least should be – entirely aligned with brand,  and is – or at least should be – both a key contributor to brand perceptions, and a key beneficiary of them.   Asking which is more important is a bit like asking whether racing drivers depend more on their car, or on its engine:  the question doesn’t really make sense, since the one is an integral part of the other.

Still, I thought it was interesting that the question was asked at all.  It seemed to reflect an attitude about brand which I thought (indeed hoped) had faded away a long time ago now – that brand is some thing like a suit of rather stylish clothes, knocked up by those clever tailors in the marketing department, and draped over the actuality of the product, service or business to attract the customer’s eye and just generally sex it up a bit.

Those who subscribe to this point of view are bound to worry about the potential for disappointment – that customers attracted by the shiny clothes will find a very much less attractive reality when they look beneath them.  As a result, they’ll say that the gap between brand and reality shouldn’t become too wide.  But, even so, they still believe that brand perceptions are created by clever marketing people doing clever marketing things,  and exist in a fundamentally separate universe from the one in which the day-to-day activities of the business actually take place.

Of course, in totally rejecting this point of view in the Financial Services Forum’s newsletter, I’m preaching to the converted.  You and I know that it doesn’t work like that.  The actuality of the way a firm goes about its day-to-day business is enormously important in shaping brand perceptions – I would say it’s very nearly all-important, except that in financial services firms go about their day-to-day business in ways that are largely invisible to people outside the firm and its customer base.

But although, as marketers, we all know this, we’ve still found it very difficult to create the kind of firm-wide commitment that’s essential to build really strong brands in businesses like ours.   In most firms, we’re in a particularly weak position when it comes to recruiting, retaining and rewarding staff:  there may be something about “living the brand” in the staff handbook, and a session on brand in the induction programme, but few firms in my experience go far beyond box-ticking like this.

Equally, very few brand marketers have much influence on spending decisions which profoundly affect customer service.  Does anyone ringing a call centre ever not hear a message which  says “Sorry, we’re experiencing an exceptionally heavy volume of calls at the moment, we’ll be with you as soon a possible”?  Customers aren’t stupid.  As soon as we hear that message, we all know that the talk about “putting customers first” is hogwash.  If you really put us first, you’d answer the bloody phone.

I could make the same point about a long list of other business functions – functions that affect brand perceptions, but in which brand marketers have little or no involvement.  (Increasingly, in today’s financial services world, decisions about outsourcing would come high on my list.  All too often, outsource partners know little and care less about the brands their clients are trying to build.)

To put all this to some kind of rather basic test, I’ve been checking out the websites and social media of a number of leading customer experience (CX) consultants.  They have a lot to say about helping clients deliver “better” and “more efficient” and “more effective” customer service – but very little about delivering different and distinctively branded customer service.  And, of course, right across financial services, that’s something that very few organisations are even trying to do.  Even the wording about that “exceptionally high volume of calls” is virtually identical.

To sum up, most brand teams in financial services have now done the easy bit – taking control of their own budgets, making their own decisions and managing their own brand-developing programmes.  But I’m afraid that still, today, in many firms, there’s a much bigger and harder task – bringing real brand-consciousness to all the other teams whose activities affect brand perceptions – that still needs doing.