Forget Marketing – Think Mutuality

In an increasingly commoditised financial services environment direct marketing must evolve new ways to connect with the customer. Martin Sutcliffe advocates the mutual approach.
We all love direct marketing don’t we? Direct marketing is the stealth bomber in the marketer’s arsenal. Done well, it runs its course virtually undetected by those who aren’t in its sights, hits its targets with pinpoint accuracy and is gone before anyone is even sure that it’s been there.
Back at base, the client is taking the responses and counting the money, while the competition licks its wounds and tries to work out why membership, sales, enquiries, renewal rates have suddenly nosedived.
But here’s the brutal truth – it never actually happens like this. However hard we try to convince ourselves that it’s strategic or highly focused, it’s more akin to setting off a series of carpet-bombs, hitting as many poor unsuspecting consumers as often as possible in the hope that some sort of message sticks, saturating the marketplace and creating a junk mail landscape.
And here’s another revelation – today’s market is no longer about what you, the company, want to tell the consumer. It’s only about what the consumer believes in, relates to and actually wants to receive.
That’s why so many campaigns are wrong. They completely underestimate the ability of today’s consumer to see through a charade. Today, buyers have more choice than ever before. They’re smarter, better informed and more empowered. They seek relevance to their lives, brand comfort and benefit exchange, to feel personalised and wanted by the company. So, as products converge, the necessity for the emotional and relevant connections to replace technique becomes far more important. In the face of no tangible difference, the only meaningful option is intangible difference. What do you offer that I can identify with? Is your brand or offer relevant to my lifestyle and me?
So, if tangible difference is now a bygone, it also follows that the iterative ‘compelling offer’ as the basis for the lifetime relationship is now an also-ran. It’s matchable or beatable. And if that is the sole basis for the decision to buy, then there is no real long-term relationship opportunity.
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