Clearing out a wardrobe in our latest spring clean, I came across a lost treasure in a ‘going out’ bag I’d not used in years.
It was a cut out of a classified ad in the Leicester Mercury from my university days, which had tickled me so much that I kept it for posterity.
For sale – Bag of assorted items – £5. Call 0116 XXXX
What was in the bag? What was the category of items? How big was the bag and did the bag itself make up part of the deal? Could I look in the bag before buying? Would the seller accept offers?
I’ve never seen an advert quite like it since and I wonder if anyone ever rang the number to enquire. Almost 30 years on, I suspect the seller has moved – having made a fortune or gone back to the day job.
The ambiguity of the ad – along with what I perceive now to be an innocence – speaks to a different time. Like a bran tub or a tombola at a country or school fair, the seller and buyer enter into a contract in which neither are sure of the outcome – but for different reasons.
For the buyer, it will either be disappointment or glee. For the seller, it’s a bit more complex. Pitch the deal right, and the buyer will come back for more. Pitch it incorrectly and you could have anything from someone feeling let down to a complaint for unfair advertising.
In marketing, these quandaries come at us daily. How can a campaign and all its elements accurately and effectively convey everything the buyer needs to know about extremely complex products and services, in a way that attracts and stands out from the rest?
Seven years ago, when we founded Rhotic Media, we were regularly asked to “Write us a blog on ESG”. With sustainability still in its infancy across the broad financial services sector, many of these requests were sent over in the form of rather nebulous briefs, but the direction of travel was clear: “We want to be seen to be doing something about it.”
Fast forward to today and that direction becomes less easy to navigate.
“Write me something on ESG” might indicate that a financial institution wants to shout out about the huge strides it has made in reducing its carbon emissions or adding diversity of thought to its boardroom.
Equally, it could have now decided to pull the whole idea, brought the old board back in and jumped on the “drill, baby, drill” idea with gusto.
It’s not just the companies themselves either, as a global population we’re more divided in our diametrically opposed ideas than we have been for some time. And we’re more resolute about how we’re right and everyone else is wrong.
This polarisation demands that financial institutions pick a side – and it’s not easy.
Demonstrate hard-won green credentials, and you could end up losing a client or worse. Show the same marketing to a different client and win a long-term mandate.
How to choose, when budgets are tight, and deadlines are looming?
Sometimes it might feel easier to do the financial services equivalent of advertising a bag of items for £5 and seeing what happens.
But I believe this is where authenticity in marketing is key to long-term success – and it needs to flow from the boardroom to the client.
If sustainability is confined to the dustbin by the top brass, tell the world. If you’re doubling down on it, put it on a billboard and prove it.
The clients will find out eventually, and it’s better they know the truth from the start, rather than when they’re halfway through a KYC process.
Doublespeak and complex manoeuvres to stay on everyone’s right side ends up pleasing very few and tying those running the show in knots.
Ambiguity only works for so long – it’s to show the world what you’re made of.