Poppy BRAIN FOOD FOR COMMUNICATORS IN FINANCE
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON A MAGAZINE LIKE THIS
AND DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON HIM Craig Mathieson. The polar explorer who keeps proving people wrong
The bank that gave its customers the keys Charles Spinosa on banking and trust What do people really think of you? Laura Gordon on the art of personal branding The big emotions behind Big Data Nathalie Nahai on the psychology of online marketing Eight steps to powerful storytelling Fraser Allen on weasels and chicken bones
ISSUE 01
MANIFEST0 Why is it called Poppy and what’s it all about? It was 2007 and we were interviewing an economist about prospects for the UK. “It’s all looking good,” he declared cheerily down the phone. “The underlying economy is strong. There are a few issues with the mortgage market in the US and a couple of building societies here have hit problems but, overall, we are set for continued growth.” A couple of weeks later he rang back, sounding worried. “Please drop the article,” he said. ‘Things have changed.” That was something of an understatement. The global economic crisis had arrived and six difficult years followed. As a creative content agency working largely in the financial services sector, we faced challenging times as projects we had been awarded were abandoned and budgets were slashed. But if it was tough for us, it was even harder for some of our clients. There were endless rounds of restructures and job losses. Uncertainty reigned, morale was rock bottom and the kudos that once came from working in banking went into reverse drive. One comms manager told us that a neighbour had taken to blanking him, holding him personally responsible for the economic crisis. Having worked closely with organisations such as Lloyds Banking Group, Scottish Widows, RBS, Standard Life and Equiniti, we were on good terms with some committed and talented comms & marketing people. We knew it was absurd that they were being tarred with the same brush as bogeymen such as Fred Goodwin. One day, we thought, we’ll launch a magazine for them. That day has arrived, and the magazine is called Poppy. ‘Poppy’ is an old slang word for ‘money’ and we think it’s a good name for a magazine offering genuinely useful food for thought about comms & marketing in the finance world. The rationale of Poppy is explained at the top of page three but, in simple terms, we’d like to share some great ideas with you. We’re keen to hear what you think of issue one – please do tell us via feedback@readpoppy.com. And we’ll be back in three months’ time.
THE POPPY TEAM
THE LEGAL & GREEN BIT
Publisher: Fraser Allen Creative Director: Eric Campbell Senior Editor: Simon Lyle Editorial team: Chiara Pannozzo, Christina McPherson, Amy Hughes Design team: Islay Brown, Lauren Lee Matt McArthur Business Manager: Jo Allen
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from White Light Media Co Ltd is strictly prohibited. The paper used for this publication is made from FSC certified sources using 100% ECF pulp. This magazine can be recycled through your kerbside collection or at a local recycling point. Not many people read this bit.
WHITE LIGHT MEDIA Poppy is published by White Light Media. We work with clients to create intelligently written, beautifully designed magazines, print and online. If you would like to explore how our team could help your comms or marketing strategy, contact Fraser Allen at: fraser@whitelightmedia.co.uk or 0131 555 6494.
Special thanks to the following friends of White Light Media who helped with feedback, advice and encouragement: Gwen Andrew, Jim Black, Lisa Breslin, Nicola Collins, Mark Johnston and Pru Whitwell. A big thank you also to Het Salon, our friends in Belgium, for planting the seed and inspiring us with their work. And finally, a big thank you to you, our readers. Remember: ‘Only dead fish swim with the stream.’ White Light Media, 54 Timber Bush, Edinburgh EH6 6QH. 0131 555 6494.
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Apart from our experience of the recession, the launch of Poppy was inspired by several trends we have observed in design, marketing and publishing:
boardrooms abound. Our financial services clients are a diverse bunch of individuals and we want Poppy to reflect their adventurous spirit and enquiring minds.
BORING BUSINESS MAGAZINES Most business magazines haven’t changed in 30 years. They rely on the same tired, cluttered formats, with content designed to attract advertisers and promote events. They’re boring to read and even more boring to look at – black and white pics of middle-aged men in
BIG IDEAS Many of our clients tell us that they are constantly fighting fires – work is busy and stressful; they don’t have time to think about the big picture. That’s where Poppy can help. Each issue will comprise a small number of in-depth features exploring big ideas that deserve attention.
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SLOW JOURNALISM We enjoy reading a magazine called Delayed Gratification published by the London-based Slow Journalism Company. Conceived as a reaction to the 24-7 rolling news agenda, it reflects intelligently on the past, providing a fresh perspective on stories that have fallen off the news carousel. Poppy is informed by some of that thinking and doffs its cap to their pioneering work.
could learn a few lessons from the way content marketing journalists create copy. We don’t tap phones, ruin people’s lives or sit in ivory towers. Instead, we work with our clients to create accurate, useful, well-written content. Poppy takes the same constructive approach. Each feature is created by a talented writer working closely with an industry-leading expert. We call it collaborative journalism.
COLLABORATIVE JOURNALISM The scribes of News International
THE GOLDEN AGE A fresh generation of entrepreneurs is shaking up
the magazine world. Publications we admire include Monocle, The Gentlewoman, Cereal, Printed Pages, the aforementioned Delayed Gratification and our own award-winning Hot Rum Cow (www.hotrumcow.co.uk). The influential blog MagCulture describes this new wave of craft publishing as ‘The Golden Age of Magazines’ – and Poppy is keen to spread the golden rays of this enlightenment through the backwaters of business magazine publishing.
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON PEOPLE LIKE HIM Craig Mathieson’s teachers never thought he would amount to anything. The Arctic explorer has spent 30 years proving them wrong – and has extraordinary leadership experiences to share.
I WISH YOU WOULD TRUST ME UK banks lost the trust of their customers and are desperate to win it back. Charles Spinosa, a New York-based communications expert, explains why they may be going about it in the wrong way.
WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL BRAND? Laura Gordon challenges you to create a brand strategy for the most important person in your career: you.
DON’T FORGET THAT WE’RE HUMAN Financial brands investing their faith in technology and convenience should tread carefully when it comes to human emotions, says web psychologist Nathalie Nahai.
I WANT TO TELL YOU A STORY As businesses rush to reinvent themselves as ‘storytellers’, Fraser Allen reveals the eight essential ingredients of truly powerful comms campaigns.
CONTENTS 3
WORDS Craig Mathieson ILLUSTRATION Tom Bingham
As a boy, Craig Mathieson was bullied by his classmates and written off by his teachers. When he told his school careers advisor that he wanted to be an explorer, she laughed at him. 23 years later, Craig led the first Scottish expeditions to ski to both the South and North Poles. Following service in the Royal Navy, he abandoned a career in financial services to focus his attention on turning around the lives of other overlooked kids – the ‘invisibles’ as he calls them. Beware. His story may change your life and career for the better
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON PEOPLE LIKE HIM
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y story starts eight years ago. I was waiting to meet the headmistress of a school in central Scotland to discuss an expedition I was planning. A young lad called Christopher sat down next to me. He was waiting to see the headmistress too – he was expecting a bollocking. I asked him what he wanted to do after leaving school and received the usual cocky teenage answers. I asked him if he liked school. “No,” he said. “I hate it. They’ve had it in for me from the start.” I saw the headmistress first. I mentioned that Christopher seemed a bit of a character. Her reply came as a shock to me. “Don’t waste your time on people like him,” she said. Yet I could relate to a boy such as Christopher. I didn’t get on well at high school. I wasn’t bright academically and I wasn’t a troublemaker. I was what I call one of the ‘invisibles’. When I wasn’t being bullied, I was being ignored. I could see a bit of that in Christopher.
Building fires, trapping rabbits
I had one teacher who was different though – the headmaster at my primary school. He was a dear old chap, one of those characters who would hold the class outside if the
weather was okay. He gave me the story of Captain Scott to read over the summer. It’s a hard book for a 12-year-old boy to get to grips with but I was glued to it. It was magical. I thought: I have to do this one day. Because I was unhappy at high school, I lived for the weekends in our village of Buchlyvie, near Stirling. I would go and camp outside all year round, building fires and trapping rabbits. I particularly loved it in the winter when it snowed. Back at school, I had a session with a careers guidance teacher. I said I wanted to be an explorer. She laughed at me and recommended that I join the local council to work on the roads. I don’t think she realised that I wanted to travel a bit further than Stirling. The other option was to join the military and of course Captain Scott was in the Royal Navy so that appealed. I went to Glasgow and asked if they still sent ships to the Antarctic. They said ‘yes’. It was the only question I had. Military life suited me because I like leading a disciplined life. To me it felt like a holiday. I loved the basic training because it was probably less demanding than what I was doing already. They didn’t send me to Antarctica immediately though. Instead I went to the Gulf when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait kicked off. I was there in a specialist role and had some very hairy times. It wasn’t pleasant at all. However,
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when the war was over, my ship sailed all the way down to South Georgia, which is famous for the exploits of another of my heroes, Ernest Shackleton, who is buried there. I said to the captain: “I’ll give up an entire year’s leave if you give me three days to cross the island.” He agreed and it was a great little adventure. But it left me wanting more.
Life as a VAT investigator
I stayed in the military for five years. When I left, I joined HM Revenue & Customs. I thought: “They lock up the bad guys – I can do that.” I learnt a lot and became a pretty determined VAT investigator, spending a lot of time in observation vans with binoculars. That led to accountancy firms offering me jobs and I ended up as a VAT partner with a company in Edinburgh. VAT is one of those issues where you only get the call when someone is in trouble and you’ve got a mess to clear up. There are some fantastic people working in accountancy but it wasn’t for me long term. I still wanted to ski to the South Pole. Decision day came when I was on the Isle of Skye, doing a management team building thing which was not going very well. My wife Michelle and I had no savings whatsoever but I remember sitting on this rock and thinking: “I’m going to do it.” So while I was still on Skye, I phoned
up the logistics company that organises travel to Antarctica and said “book me in for next year”. Before I’d even got home, Michelle had received an invoice for $80,000. Having a bill like that really focuses your mind – and the thoughts of people around you. Your family has to be fully committed too. Life was about to change big time. It was challenging for me but it was much harder for my wife and three young children.
Two marathons a day
To ski to the South Pole in any meaningful sense, you’ve got to start at the edge of the continent, which is a distance of 730 miles. It’s also uphill – by the time you reach the pole you are 9,300ft up. Temperatures range from -50C to -60C, although I had days when it reached -70C. If you feel a tad chilly, you have to put an extra scarf on. It’s a great place if you want to lose some weight because you burn up to 10,000 calories a day, which is the equivalent of running two marathons a day for two months. So you have to get fit. I trained every day, including holidays. A typical working day for me was to get up at 4am and either drag some tyres up and down a hill for three hours or go for a 20-mile run. I’d also go for a mile and a half swim in a loch some days, but only in the winter – it was too warm in the summer.
Breakfast would be a massive bowl of porridge, handfuls of dried fruit and a chopped banana on top. I’d wolf that down then eat six boiled eggs and six raw eggs. Then I’d go to work. At noon, I’d do another two hours of training, usually dragging tyres up and down Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – my employer was very understanding. Lunch would be a whole chicken followed by a pint of cream down in one. The best time of day would be 3pm when I’d eat a whole cake or a couple of packets of biscuits. Then I’d be in the gym for a couple of hours in the evening. It’s that sort of dedication that you need to do a trip like this. There was one very important thing I needed on this trip and that was someone else to go on the expedition with me. It’s a big decision. One thing you consider is size – two well-built men in a tent is a bit cramped. I got a tip-off in Glasgow about a woman called Fiona Taylor who could be right for the trip. Actually, she was perfect. She had that old-school grit – very determined and mentally tough. She’d never done anything like this before but anyone can get fit enough to do this trip. It’s just a question of putting one foot in front of the other a wee bit longer than normal. I taught her everything I knew: how to ski, how to dress, what to eat and we became a really disciplined team. We practised everything. We did days and
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days of training together over weekends so everything became second nature and we never had to question ourselves. We just knew what to do. The main thing was that we got along with one another. We became friends and great team-mates. It was also important that she became good friends with Michelle – they got on really well.
Colder than a freezer
We trained for 18 months and then left Scotland in October 2004. On 2 November we arrived at our camp at Hercules Inlet. It was a bad start. We encountered a full-blown Antarctic storm. During the first night in the tent it was -50C inside and -18C inside the sleeping bag. That’s colder than a freezer. Fiona started to develop frostbite and, more dangerously, hypothermia. We consulted the doctors by satellite phone and they stopped her from continuing. It was devastating news for her. At the time, the press suggested that I was considering returning home with Fiona. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Fiona had no choice but I was determined to carry on. I felt disheartened though. I had lost my team-mate. The day I left her, the temperature dropped to -70C. When you’re in those kinds of temperatures for long periods of time, weird things happen. I felt something loose in my mouth so I took off my ski mask. When
“ Pick any child you like from anywhere in Scotland – I will get them to the North Pole and show you how it changes their life.”
I spat, it froze straight away into something solid and dropped to the ground. It looked like pure white paper. I thought nothing of it at the time but, when I got back to Scotland, it turned out that the ‘white paper’ was the enamel from my teeth – the cold wind had shattered it. Blisters would form inside my mouth from breathing in the cold air and the tears from my eyes would freeze on my face. But I was having the time of my life. This was something I had wanted to do since I was 12 years old.
Just ski faster
I’ve met a lot of motivational people in my life but talking to my family by satellite phone was the best motivation of all. One day when I was struggling, my son Jake said to me: “Daddy, just ski faster.” He just wanted me home and it worked. You get tired and hungry, but throughout those times I’d just think about my children and having them next to me and telling me to keep going. Once you learn to navigate, you can let go of the GPS and use a classic compass. And on the nicer days, when there was nothing but sun, I could navigate simply from my shadow. Those were great days. You start climbing the polar plateau and you see the curvature of the Earth; the sky goes from the light blue of the atmosphere into the black of space and you’ve got 5.5 million sq miles of ice to yourself. Of course, you can’t ski 730 miles without something going wrong and the big thing for me was when my tendon in my knee snapped. I felt pain in the base of my spine, the base of neck and my groin. The tendon was sticking out through my skin, so I pulled it down with pliers and strapped it to my leg. I grew up in a household where we never took any pills for anything so this was my first experience of painkillers. I took some
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Nurofen and the first thing I noticed was they tasted delicious. They’re sugar coated! However, they didn’t stop the pain so next up was codeine. That didn’t work either. The doctor then suggested a mild form of morphine. That did the trick – I knew I was in pain but the morphine meant I didn’t care any more. And I kept skiing.
DIY surgery
I had another problem when I was just three days from the South Pole. My feet had frozen when I had my boots off in the tent and the big toe on one foot got infected. I sent a picture to the doctor at base camp. He immediately replied that they were going to have to fly in to get me and take me to a hospital. There was no way I was going to let that happen. I refused point blank and asked to speak to a surgeon who could talk me through what I needed to do. I sterilised a knife, listened to his instructions and sliced through my toe cutting the nail part off. On 28 December 2004, I was skiing along when I saw a black dot in the distance. I knew what it was. It was the South Pole research station. At that point, I felt every emotion I had had since I was 12 hit me like a sledgehammer. I wish I could tell you what the last 11 miles felt like but I honestly couldn’t. It was a blur. People have asked me if arriving at the South Pole was an anticlimax after everything I’d done. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I think about that moment every single day of my life. I managed to put my tent up where Roald Amundsen’s tent was – it was magical. A couple of Americans from the research station came out to greet me and invited me in. We chatted for a long time while they drank big mugs of coffee. Eventually I said: “Any chance of offering me a coffee?” “Sorry,” they said. “It’s US Government
policy. We’re not allowed to offer any food or drink to visitors.” A couple of years later, I told this story to an audience in Edinburgh. Afterwards, a big American came up to me and apologised profusely for what had happened. A couple of weeks later a big crate arrived at my house. There was a card from the House of Representatives in Washington thanking me for my work and explaining that the crate contained a very large supply of coffee. A plane picked me up a couple of days after arriving at the South Pole – which was just as well as I’d run out of rations. I was a shell of a man. At the start of the expedition I had weighed 13 stone; now I weighed just eight and a half. Forget Weight Watchers, this is far better.
Searching for the ‘invisibles’
Back in Edinburgh, I turned up at work. They took one look at me and told me to go home for a month and recover. But I couldn’t just sit around. I decided to go into schools to give free lectures on my experiences – I quickly received more than 850 requests from all over Scotland. It was during these visits that I noticed three distinct groups of children: the A-graders, the disruptives and the ‘invisibles’ that I mentioned earlier. The invisibles never put up a fuss, they just got on with things. When I asked these children what they wanted to be when they grew up, I’d get brilliant answers. But they lacked confidence. They didn’t think they could be what they wanted to be. I was also called into the Scottish Parliament for three days to talk to them about the trip to the South Pole and my school lectures. The politicians understood what I meant by ‘invisibles’ so I asked them what they were doing about it. All I got was a load of waffle. So the then First Minister Jack McConnell asked me what I would do. My response
was: “Pick any child you like from anywhere in Scotland – I will get them to the North Pole and show you how it changes their life.” To my surprise they agreed, but in typical Scottish style they wanted the initiative to be kept hush-hush in case it didn’t work out. As it was, they left me to find the child to take. But I was determined it should be someone who was seen as a lost cause. Someone that nobody wanted to waste time on. I chose Christopher. I went to see his parents. They were lovely people but even they had given up on him. They said they’d ‘lost’ Christopher years ago. He no longer talked to them. He just sat in his bedroom playing computer games. Nobody thought he was capable of achieving anything. Christopher was perfect for the trip – and he told me he wanted to do it. I could see a spark in him.
Team Christopher
We came to an arrangement that meant his parents had to be part of the team. I would train Christopher but they would also have to go the gym three times a week and get fit. They would all have to eat healthier food and, for the first time in years, sit down and eat all their meals together. It had to be a team effort. The first few weeks were chaos. I was turning up at 4am to take Christopher on long runs or make him drag tyres up hills; he and his parents were struggling to cope. But by the third week, when I turned up at his house, he would be outside waiting for me, ready to go, excited, enjoying it. His parents were getting fit too, and they were all talking to each other. Christopher trained really hard. I taught him how to ski, and a lot of the other skills I’d taught Fiona. I could see he was getting close to being physically and mentally able to do what nobody thought he was capable of – skiing to the North Pole. It was time for a test. I told him he was going to run a marathon. He turned up
Craig learnt a lot from his Polar expeditions – and many of the lessons apply to anyone working in business.
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People with limited ambition will always try to put you and your dream down. Thank them for their thoughts and promptly ignore everything they say.
4 NOFORPLACE EGOS
Avoid wasting time with egomaniacs – they are the first to panic when the chips appear to be down.
Take me to the North Pole
The day came when we were finally going to make our trip to the North Pole. We were dropped off via helicopter at our starting point and before we set off I handed the compass to Christopher and said: “You’re taking me to the North Pole. This is your expedition.” It couldn’t have gone more smoothly. The conditions were fine, we were well organised and Christopher was by now very fit and very determined. I still played the occasional trick on him though. Given that our expedition was in the summer when there is permanent sunlight, we would ski for eight hours then rest/sleep for eight hours. One day Christopher said he was really struggling with tiredness so could he sleep for 16 hours to recharge his batteries. Okay, I said, on the condition that in our next session after that we ski for 16 hours too. He agreed. I woke him up after his big sleep. “How do you feel?” I asked. “Brilliant,” he said. “I really needed that. That was a great sleep.” I never told him that I had only let him sleep for eight hours. I still made him ski for 16 hours though. Tiredness is all in the mind. We reached the North Pole on 24 April 2006. We arrived there ahead of schedule, without a scratch. It was fantastic. On arrival, I phoned the First Minister and was put on loudspeaker in the Scottish Parliament. I thought, should I go for it? And I did. I gave them a 10-minute lecture on the youth of the nation and to stop being so bloody negative.
The new Christopher
SIX THINGS I LEARNED
IGNORE THE DOOM-MONGERS
with his running gear on. I told him to put his walking boots back on, wear his overalls and put his backpack on – and that I’d be running the marathon with him. We had a fantastic day. We joked and laughed all the way around, spurring each other on. We did it, together. I was really proud of him. We stopped for some soup on the way back in the car and I told him to check the distance we had run on the map. “Why bother?” he said. “You told me we’d run a marathon, which is 26 miles.” I showed him the map. He’d actually run 40 miles.
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THINK IN TERMS OF FOOTSTEPS
Regardless of the journey you are about to embark on, savour that first footstep then focus on the final one.
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FEAR IS YOUR FRIEND
To be afraid is good. Harness it as it will make you stronger and more focused.
5 KEEP LEARNING 6 ENJOY YOURSELF
Always trust your own abilities but never accept that you know everything; further improvement can always be achieved.
Regardless of what is socially accepted, you CAN wear the same pair of woolly pants for two months when out for a very long walk.
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I was so proud of Christopher. Here was a guy who had had zero aspirations, zero confidence and was so shy he wouldn’t even talk to his parents. I took him to school on his first day back and all his fellow students lined up and clapped him in. I like to think that some of the teachers hung their heads in shame. Christopher grew up whilst on the ice and now understood what achievement meant. He became the first person from his family ever to make it to university and he graduated from Aberdeen last year with a first in Geology. His life and that of his parents has been transformed – and they did it themselves. They just needed a bit of encouragement. There are ‘invisibles’ like myself and Christopher everywhere. At school, in banks, in insurance companies, and every other segment of society. You may well be one too – and you almost certainly work with some. When we push ourselves and encourage others to fulfil their ambitions, it is extraordinary what can be achieved. And it doesn’t take a special talent. It just takes hard work, determination and a positive attitude. The financial services world has taken some serious knocks in recent years, largely of our own making. And it’s not the easiest of arenas in which to push through radical ambitions. But disruption also creates opportunity. And you don’t have to walk to the South Pole to set off on a thrilling expedition of your own making – or to encourage your colleagues to do the same.
THE POLAR ACADEMY Craig Mathieson now dedicates his career to finding other Christophers. He has established the Polar Academy which, each year, will take four schoolchildren on an expedition to the North Pole. He does however need financial support to make the project happen. Visit www. polaracademy.org to find out more.
WORDS Charles Spinosa ILLUSTRATION Mark Airs
I WISH YOU WOULD TRUST ME I
magine a bank where, if something goes wrong, you can call the Chief Executive – and if he’s not around, he will call you back. Imagine a bank whose employees are given money to spend on random acts of kindness for customers. And imagine a bank that trusts you so much it may even leave you the key to lock up the branch. If you live in Oregon, Washington or Northern California, you don’t have to imagine that kind of bank. It already exists. It’s called Umpqua Bank and it has cracked the code of building customer trust, while leaving UK banks (and most US banks) scratching their heads. We’ll be returning to Umpqua later. If CEOs of UK banks genuinely want to know how to build trust, they needn’t necessarily travel to Oregon – they simply have to go shopping. Retailers in the UK are good at building trust, and the best example of all is the John Lewis Partnership. John Lewis has created a very likeable, attentive, British customer experience – and the secret lies in actively extending and receiving trust. You ask John Lewis customers what they think and they will say: “I shop at John Lewis for everything.” “John Lewis is not just a shop. It’s like home.” “I trust the store.” “It’s my spiritual home. When I die, I’ve asked my husband to sprinkle my ashes there.” Incidentally, all of these quotes are genuine; at least that’s what the people at John Lewis say, and I trust them. So how do they do it? It starts with a service promise – ‘Never knowingly undersold’ – around which it designs the rest of the customer experience. The promise carries a double load. First, it addresses directly the anxiety that John Lewis customers feel when a John Lewis store performs at its best. ‘Wait, I really like it here; how much am I paying for this experience?’ ‘Nothing! It’s free. It’s who we are, never knowingly undersold.’
Think about anxiety
All businesses at their best create customer anxieties. Most businesses ignore these to take care of frustrations that occur when
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A decade ago, UK banks possessed something most brands can only dream of: trust. They had it in spadefuls. But we all know what happened. Big banks jettisoned that hard-earned trust in a financial storm of their own making. The reputation of the broader financial services market also suffered as a consequence. Can that trust ever be regained? If so, does the answer lie in friendly ad campaigns, retro branding and dishing out cupcakes in branches? Or are there more fundamental issues around trust that the major players have still to grasp? Charles Spinosa thinks so. He demonstrates how one bank in the US took a revolutionary approach to earning the trust of its customers through ‘spontaneous magic’ – and wonders whether counterparts in the UK are doomed to failure because they are merely ‘playing the trust game’
things go wrong. But by responding to anxieties that occur when things go right, businesses like John Lewis show, first, a special humility. Even at their best, they are not perfect. Secondly, the promise actively extends trust to John Lewis customers. Consider the blow to the stomach any retail sales representative suffers when a customer says, “I’ll just check the price next door.” No one comes back from next door. John Lewis trusts that its customers will not take its promise as an incentive to check out competitors. Customers respect that. UK bankers know how John Lewis does it. After hearing about service promises, how they build trust, and how some regional banks in the US have thrived with them, the Head of Retail at one of the UK’s largest banks said: “I will never have a service promise.” This senior manager speaks for most UK financial services senior managers. Insurers are a bit more open-minded. Generally, instead of focusing on trust, financial services senior managers build convenient and friendly customer experiences. True, regional managers and marketing and communications people in the UK are finding ways to build trust, but they need to make senior managers their advocates. That’s a problem. Why do senior managers talk aspirationally about trust but build only the lightweight trust of a consistent experience?
the Bank of Ireland, AIB, RSA, Hiscox, and others. The story makes sense. In the age of mass commerce, globalisation, digitisation, terrorism, high-tech crime and volatile markets (the crisis of 2008), calculations of reliability have to replace discretionary trust. The best senior management can do is run the algorithm closer to the managers on the ground to let clients know faster, and senior managers have developed processes to do that. Some US regional banks do a little better. Peter McGill, the Credit Manager at First Niagara Bank in Buffalo, insists that his team use traditional banking sense. The bank lends more and has fewer defaults than its peers. But financial services generally stick with the algorithm and the lightweight trust approach. ‘Your trust is our most important investment,’ said one billboard. Such trust coming from mere consistency
The way of the dodo bird
Senior managers believe that robust trust has gone the way of the dodo bird. Trust thrived when bankers and insurers knew their customers personally. The banker or insurance broker spent time with them in the community. The bankers and brokers also knew each customer’s financial reputation and helped customers grow their reputations. They helped the trustworthy when no one else would. Decisions were made through personal knowledge, not risk algorithms. It seems like a fairy tale now. In the world of mass consumption, no large financial services institution can allow that kind of personal discretion. But without the discretion to override a risk algorithm, there is no real trust. This story comes from senior bankers and insurers at Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds,
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of experience can be bought and sold like an investment. Purchase the tools from consultants. Is this the trust that RBS’s Ross McEwan, Barclays’ Antony Jenkins and Lloyds’ António Horta-Osório build?
Gee whizz technology
Building lightweight trust only makes sense because financial services people have become smart. They stand back from the market and ask: “What do we really want when we say we want the customer’s trust?” They answer: “We want customers who would feel ashamed for moving their money or not taking our new product.” Such senior managers want the trust effect – the shame felt for moving money – rather than true trust with its attendant vulnerability and risk. They seek the effect of trust from extremely convenient service delivered via carefully mapped customer journeys with graceful friendliness at every
moment of truth and ‘gee whizz’ digital tools to keep everything moving. Imagine this. You see a house that you would like to own. You photograph it with your phone and receive the relevant pictures of its interior, its price, inspection reports, and a mortgage offer from your bank. Click to send the offer to the seller. Are you a premium customer? You then receive details on comparable homes in the area and an automated suggestion that comes from ‘big data’ analytics. It points out a house closer to the specialist wine retailer. You touch the screen and take your spouse to dinner to celebrate. At dinner you use a similar bank application to select the special champagne. Point. Shoot. And wow! Such banking is nearly here. Look at the Australian Commonwealth Bank’s video: ‘Vision for 2013: we’re improving customer service’. Vernon Hill’s UK Metro Bank offers a Vegasstyle experience. Jayne-Anne Gadhia’s Virgin offers no-strings-attached Virgin lounges under the community-centric flag of making everyone better off. Wow! There is one minor hiccup. Such showiness brings out the worst in bankers. Did you know that you wanted to point your mobile phone at a house, click the camera, and then have your bank prepare your offer to buy the house? Probably not! Gee whizz technology knows us better than we know ourselves. It lacks humility. That lack of humility infuriates financial service customers from the top to the bottom.
The greatest bank in the world
Unlike high-tech thrills, trust is humble. We do not impose our view on people who trust us. We give them our best advice, and when it matters, we do for them what they would want us to do, not what we would do. Smart bankers at Lloyds TSB and smart underwriters at RSA extended this trust to brokers for a while and gained more and better business. But sustaining such humility is hard. Hans Ganz, the retired CEO of San Diego’s Pacific Trust Bank, knows a thing or two about humility. He grew his bank on the service promise: ‘Try us for six months; if you want to leave for any reason after that, we will pay you $50.’ He thrilled at taking visitors into any branch and asking customers at random, “What do you think of this bank?” Invariably, the customer answered: “This is the greatest bank in the world.” When asked which bank he worried about most, Ganz said Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase. When 30 successful JPMorgan Chase branch managers in Manhattan were asked what mattered most to them as an indicator of the day’s success, they said ‘the customers’ mood’. Not profitability per customer, not well-executed moments of truth in the customer journey, not the number of products sold per segment per day. Mood! It is a radical break. To monitor mood, branch managers have to stand in the shoes of their customers and accept that their perspectives count more than their own. Mood leads to humility, and that can lead to trust. While the US regional banks extend trust, the UK looks to its big bank regional managers. Consider Dan Godsall, now MD of Premier Banking and Small Business
“Trust is so great that Umpqua managers let their best clients lock up at night after using the bank.”
at Barclays. In 2011, Dan spent his holidays making his pilgrimage to Umpqua Bank in Portland, Oregon. Umpqua leads all banks in building a trusting retail experience with its customers. Its service promise is clear. If something goes wrong and you cannot get it resolved, call the CEO, Ray Davis. Each branch has a phone on a pedestal to make the call. (With Umpqua’s steady growth, unbelieving observers have predicted the promise’s demise year after year. They don’t appreciate how motivating the promise is to drive employees to make every customer happy.) Employees also receive an allowance to spend on ‘random acts of kindness’ for customers. Umpqua posts the happy consequences on its home page.
Community missionaries
At Umpqua, Dan saw a banker’s fairy tale. Lani Hayward, Umpqua’s Executive Vice President of Creative Strategies, told Dan to go to any ‘store’ and talk to the customers and the manager. On entering, Dan saw neatly stacked products of all sorts. He asked the manager who was brimming with pride, what all those products were. The manager explained that they were products from local businesses. The bank offers some of its space to businesses in the neighbourhood. Then Dan asked about the pictures of people he saw behind the reception desk.
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“Those are our customers,” he explained. The manager went on to explain that the bank had evolved from a retail store into a community space. He encourages area businesses, community boards, and others to use the bank space, particularly after banking hours. The staff became community missionaries. They do not promise the best rates but promise to reinvest the money into the local community. Trust is so great that Umpqua managers let their best clients lock up at night after using the bank. When Dan came back and told his branch managers about Umpqua, his Cornwall branch manager caught the bug. He ran a Cornwall Christmas programme in his bank. In his first year, he had 92 businesses displaying their products and selling them at the bank. The bank staff became so involved they sat in for local business staff when they left their stands. The cashiers did what it took to make the store work. It was like live improvisatory theatre. The whole scene was so celebratory that the following year, more than 2,000 businesses displayed wares in branches, and the bank signed up vendors to display their goods throughout the year. Dan and his team had to trust the vendors, especially the food vendors, to supply great value, service, and quality. The vendors repaid that trust, as they universally delighted customers and signed up for accounts. The spontaneous trust was magical. Building on his Christmas success, Dan started a money-saver, time-saver programme for branch staff. Each week he would challenge staff to test out a way to save money. He started by challenging them to go to an energy site and save on energy costs. Once they started reporting back on the internet, the magic started. They started asking customers. “Have you thought about switching your energy supplier?” they excitedly asked in the middle of a transaction. “I just did and saved money.” Cashiers would help customers enter their information. Word of mouth buzzed. In one Welsh branch, a customer asked if the bank was the place for changing energy companies. Again, for a cashier to act with such spontaneity, he or she has to trust that the customer will respond positively and spontaneously. Does it work? Dan has an exceptionally high growth rate in small and medium sized business customers. But the spontaneity and trust are not natural fits with banking culture. Marketing and communications colleagues are pressurised to polish everything up; and senior managers pitch in with de-risked vendor management processes. While Dan’s ‘improv’ banking is magical for staff and customers alike, it requires a leader’s commitment and the staff ’s imagination. Sustaining it will require a team across the entire bank. What can marketing and communications professionals do to help make this branch theatre happen? The answer is: understand the improvisational character of this new trust and accept the humility it requires. Did Ross McEwan of RBS simply state a fact or demonstrate humility when he said: “We are the least trusted company in the least trusted sector.” A senior banker can grow trust fast by extending it. Ask yourself: Does your bank CEO trust you the way Ray Davis trusts his customers?
DR CHARLES SPINOSA Charles Spinosa, Ph.D., is Group Director at VISION Consulting. For 20 years he has helped clients deploy trustbuilding customer experiences that drive profitable increases in market share. UK clients have included RSA, UK Post Office Financial Services, Deutsche Bank and ABN AMRO. In addition to trust, Charles writes on issues such as corporate politics, transformational leadership, innovation and promise-based management. Additional research contributed by Peter McCudden.
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10 ESSENTIAL STEPS TO BUILDING CUSTOMER TRUST
2 Be humble and always be willing to listen and to learn.
5 Build a culture of trust by extending some trust to employees and suppliers. A little vulnerability is better than no risk. Risk free means trust free.
3 Figure out what makes your customers anxious, and create a John Lewisstyle customer promise to take care of the anxiety. Extend trust with the promise.
6 Make your business a visible, active part of the community. Draw other businesses in and create your own community missionaries. Pay your employees for days off doing charitable work in the community.
Trust is reciprocal. Demonstrate that you genuinely trust your customers, and they are likely to trust you.
4 If you feel you can’t commit to a service promise, identify whether you distrust your people or your customers or both. Then figure out why and fix it.
7 Put trust at the centre like John Lewis Partners or Umpqua Bank, and you will find plenty of room for cool experiences and gee whizz technology at the periphery.
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Create an improvisational space with your customers. Ask the unusual question. Share ideas. Give stuff for free. Celebrate. You don’t have to be Richard Branson, Ray Davis or Dan Godsall to do it.
Judge your success on the mood of your customers. Personally, go out and ask customers at random what they think of your business.
How much would you have to change things so that you could lend your customer the key to your business? Make that change your mission.
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WORDS Laura Gordon ILLUSTRATION Aron Jones
WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL BRAND? Everybody you meet has an opinion about you. And whether you like it or not, those opinions come together to define your brand. How can you turn this to your advantage? Laura Gordon guides you through the essentials of personal branding
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f you work in comms or marketing, much of your working day will directly or indirectly be focused on strengthening, promoting and protecting your organisation’s brand. But how often do you think about a brand much closer to home: YOU. Personal branding is not just for the likes of David Beckham lounging about in his underpants – we are all brands. And by thinking of ourselves in that way – and developing our own brand strategy – we can really help to boost our career. Furthermore, this idea applies to everyone – however junior or senior. To pick on a pantomime villain of the modern era, if Fred Goodwin had ever thought of himself as a personal brand, he might have prevented himself from making some notorious errors of judgement. Here are eight steps to getting a personal branding strategy to work for you.
What do you stand for?
We’ve all seen large organisations talk about brand values – many of you work for them. Sometimes these values are at the heart of a vibrant and infectious company culture; sometimes they’re a bit of a flop that nobody takes much notice of. But with your personal brand, it’s much simpler. There is no board required to sign your values off and no committees involved to water down your thinking with jargon and clichés. This is the fun bit. You can decide what you stand for and what values you want to project – and concentrate on making sure you get them across clearly. In a work context, you also need to decide how you want to describe yourself. What are your strengths? Maybe you are passionate about marketing ideas; maybe you are a strategic comms expert – you decide. And think about people’s perception of you. How do you make people feel? How do people benefit from working with you? How would colleagues describe you? And do you need to make any changes to your behaviour to make your brand more attractive?
Talk yourself up
Identifying what really fires you up is very motivating – now you just have to talk about it. Share your ideas, talk to like-minded people. Develop a philosophy towards your work; something you believe in that sets you apart from all the other comms and marketing professionals. People talk a lot about elevator pitches – i.e. how you would describe your qualities to a stranger in a lift. These can sound clunky and forced but it is definitely worth thinking about the sort of thing you would want to say and questions you would ask if, by chance or design, you find yourself talking to the Chief Executive, or someone else of influence. Instead of a pitch, think about an initial hook – something to get their attention and then back it up with something positive about what you have to offer.
Embrace social media
If you’re serious about developing and nourishing your career through a fully joined-up personal branding strategy there really is no excuse for not embracing social media, however senior you are. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are incredibly useful tools for spreading influence, harvesting ideas and connecting with
like-minded people. LinkedIn is also handy as a live database of business contacts – whenever anyone you are connected to moves jobs, their details are updated for you. Of course, common sense is required. You can damage your reputation by posting inappropriate content. And ensure that the way you project yourself online is consistent with the way you project yourself in person. Some people who seem very lively and engaging online can be a disappointment when you meet them face to face!
Get to know your colleagues
A study carried out in the 1990s showed that the likelihood of achieving promotion in a corporate environment is 10% to do with how good you are at your job, 30% to do with your appearance and 60% to do with how good you are at building contacts within your own business. People talk a lot about networking in terms of wandering around a room of strangers with a cocktail sausage in one hand and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the other, but some of the most instantly valuable networking you can do is within your own organisation. Get about – speak to other departments; make allies.
Build a network
That doesn’t mean that external networking isn’t important – far from it. Creating your own network of like-minded supporters and allies will open all sorts of new opportunities. Yet so many people, junior and senior, shy away from it. That’s such a wasted opportunity. Seek out events where there will be like-minded people – whether it’s an IoIC networking event or an exclusive club for senior marketing execs. Find out in advance who will be there. Arrive early. Ask people questions and listen to what they say. Decide who you want to see again – they should be people that you can help and that can help you; and they should also be people you like. People buy people, and building strong and mutually beneficial relationships is what counts.
trustworthiness and many other factors such as culture, sexuality and intelligence. So think carefully about what you wear, how you talk, how you shake hands, how you walk into a room … It takes eight positive impressions to overcome an initial negative impression. So get it right first time, or you (and your brand) will take a hit.
Ask for help
Organisations appoint agencies to help with their branding strategies because they appreciate the value of external professional expertise. Likewise, if you are serious about creating a really effective personal brand, it’s a good idea to do some work with an executive coach, who can help you to see yourself as others do. Many senior execs in the US employ coaches who they talk to on a regular basis and the trend is rapidly spreading across the UK. It can make a big difference.
Review the strategy
So you’ve defined what you stand for. People are listening to you with interest, both online and in person, because you care about what you do and have ideas and opinions. You’ve also got a great network of allies and supporters that you’ve cultivated by sharing ideas and contacts. People like your brand. You are also highly visible within your own organisation – people see you as someone who is well connected and solves problems rather than creates them. You look the part and people enjoy being with you. Hey, it looks like you’re about to be promoted or offered a job elsewhere. Sounds pretty good? But keep reviewing your personal brand. How can it be developed? What’s holding you back? Why not put a date in the diary every six months when you sit down and work out what the next stage of your personal branding strategy is? It’s a competitive world. If you’re doing that and those around you aren’t, you will soon enjoy the benefits.
Keep relationships alive
People often strike up very positive conversations at networking events, exchange business cards and then never do anything about it afterwards. Follow up quickly with an email or a phone call or LinkedIn invitation or message. Arrange to meet again when appropriate. Introduce them to other useful contacts and share information with them. Keep a list of people you want to develop a business relationship with and refer back to it to ensure you’re keeping in touch with everyone. But don’t pester; ensure that their interaction with you (and your personal brand) is enjoyable. And if they’re stand-offish, just move on.
Appearance is very important
In an ideal world, we should only be judging people on their skills and their values; but we’re human, so we don’t. There is no getting away from it. If you really want to flourish professionally, appearance is important. That means dressing the part. It also means body language, the way you talk, the accessories you carry, the whole package. Some people who have very strong skills in specific areas think these things don’t really matter. Perhaps not but why not use every tool at your disposal? In the first seven seconds of meeting, people will make numerous subconscious judgements about you to do with your
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Laura Gordon, who has degrees in both psychology and law, is a leadership coach and is one of the best-connected people in the Scottish business world. Originally a corporate lawyer, she became Director of the Government-funded Glasgow:Edinburgh Collaboration initiative and now runs Corporate Connections International and is a CEO Group Chair with Vistage International. “I’ve always been interested in people and I think that’s probably the basis for successful networking,” she says. “There are so many people out there pushing their own agenda and saying ‘listen to me, listen to me, I’ve got something to sell’ that people who show a genuine interest in others and ask questions, really stand out. “That applies whether you’re meeting people in person or communicating via social media. The companies and leaders that listen to their customers, their employees and their stakeholders are the ones who are truly successful. “What’s my brand? I’m a networker and I’m a connector. I enjoy meeting people, finding out about them, connecting them with others and working with people to help them become better leaders. It’s very rewarding.”
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WORDS Nathalie Nahai ILLUSTRATION John W. Tomac
DON’T FORGET THAT WE’RE HUMAN The future for financial brands is easy. It’s technology, it’s Big Data, it’s functionality. Except it’s not. Web psychologist Nathalie Nahai explains why business overlooks the powerful emotions of human beings at its peril
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century from now, our descendants will look back and marvel at how quaint we were way back in 2014. “Look at them,” they will squeal. “Dashing about with their little phones, working five days a week and ironing their clothes. They barely even knew the meaning of nanotechnology.” But for us living here now, it feels like a time of enormous change. This is the century when data broke the dams, the era of information overload, the constant flurry of digital voices. No wonder that communications technology is occupying the minds of forward-looking businesses. Following the economic crisis, many businesses (particularly banks) saw technology as the secret to reinventing themselves and winning back the faith of their customers. And board directors the world over asked their consultants: “Where is technology taking us, where are we heading?” But societies have a bad habit of not learning from history. Rapid shifts in technology are nothing new and past experience should remind us that humans drive technology, not the other way around. After all, the internet is simply a way of connecting humans with other humans. Every time we create a new technology, whether it’s lighting a fire, sending a telegram or creating a website, we simply use it to help us do stuff we have been doing anyway since the earliest days of civilisation – communicating, trading, flirting, telling stories. The danger with obsessing over the technology itself is that we look at the latest shiny toy and think “that’s our magical solution, that’s our silver bullet”. But in the majority of cases, it’s not. Businesses need much more than technology to understand the richness of a person or an audience. As a result, the digital revolution has spawned a series of behavioural science books about applying neural-marketing and web psychology to online spaces – the writers
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Nir Eyal and BJ Fogg are good examples. And this is good – people are learning how to make the technology work as well as possible for people like us – human beings.
HUMAN BEHAVIOUR 1
Big Data
Big Data is a fascinating development but it’s only effective when applied alongside other contextual tools. In basic terms, that means knowing when a correlation is meaningful and when it’s not; and combining that with academic research around psychographics – the study of personality, values, attitudes and lifestyles. We don’t act as automatons in response to technological drivers, we react as humans. It’s amazing how few brands think about the psychology of the individuals in their audience. You see this in the way that some businesses have approached social media. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to clamp down on dialogue. Bigger organisations often fear social media and the impact of word of mouth. The problem is that if a company decides not to participate in that conversation, those customers are still going to talk about them, but the conversation will be one-sided. Whatever you think you are doing to build your brand, your customers will have a much bigger say in terms of whether people believe you are reputable and trustworthy. If you don’t take part in that conversation, your brand will almost certainly suffer.
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Financial brands that avoid social media are just allowing everyone else to have a one-sided conversation about them.
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Old-fashioned businesses often reach out to customers by focusing on logic and rationality, overlooking the powerful triggers of the primal and emotional brains.
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The next big developments will be the ‘internet of things’ and the quantified self. How is your brand gearing up to tackle these opportunities?
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Hyper-personalisation is going to be a bone of contention. The brands that succeed will be the ones who open a discussion with customers rather than robbing them of their privacy.
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Financial brands, just like humans, should collaborate more.
Emotional drivers
Financial services businesses have embraced technology and, in some cases, see it as the salvation of their brands. But while they push the logical benefits to customers, they can overlook the primal and emotional drivers that are just as important. Take lawyers as an example. We don’t really think of lawyers as emotional; we think of them as logical. Law firms generally promote themselves with very logical language, yet when most of us actually use a lawyer, it’s at a time of high emotion in our lives – maybe we’re getting divorced, or there has been a death in the family. We
Don’t let technology overwhelm the way you communicate with customers; human emotion and psychology are neglected at your peril.
see our lawyer as a steward of transition at a difficult time, so why don’t they promote how they can make us ‘feel’ as well as what they can ‘do’ for us? Of course, professionals cannot be seen to (or be allowed to) manipulate people at a vulnerable time, so appealing to a client’s ‘emotional brain’ has to be approached with care and integrity. Nonetheless, many finance brands have scope for connecting with people in a more proactive, emotional way, recognising and empathising with the circumstances in which customers require help – be it buying a house, tackling money problems, starting a business etc. Some of the newer financial institutions such as Simple Banking seem to get this, and are certainly more approachable and keen to remove barriers. Simple’s tagline of ‘worryfree alternative to traditional banking’ sums it up well.
Hyper-personalisation
The next big sweep will be through the ‘internet of things’. The concept of the quantified self has arrived, as has being able to access behavioural data through things we wear. No one knows how that will change things. In terms of software shifts, we’re moving towards hyper-personalisation and individual psychographic profiles. There’s a big issue in the UK at the moment with insurance companies using metadata. People say it’s anonymous, but it’s not. If I find out that someone in my street has called
Nathalie Nahai lectures widely on the subject of Web Psychology and is author of Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. Clients include Google, the BBC, The Guardian, Unilever and Nokia. thewebpsychologist.com
up an escort service, then a week later they call their GP, then a day later they visit A&E, it’s a fair bet that their health insurance prospects may be compromised. We may see banks and insurance companies discriminate against people and give preferential treatment to others based on data they gather without their permission. That would be a major concern for consumers and, if banks don’t adapt quickly enough to the new market and people’s concerns/expectations, they will struggle. The companies that will flourish long term are the ones who treat their customers’ data with genuine confidentiality, are transparent in how they use it and also give their customers a say in how it’s used. It’s about opening a discussion with customers rather than robbing them of their privacy. Financial brands can also develop by embracing positive aspects of human nature, such as collaboration. As individuals, we tend to operate in silos and compartmentalise things, which can be very dangerous. We do this as businesses too, and we saw what happened to many banks as a result of not seeing the bigger picture. Businesses should collaborate more, learning from others that have travelled further along the same path. Financial services businesses waste a lot of time forging their own way online when they could learn from earlier pioneers, such as the advertising industry. We should talk to each other a little more, like humans.
WELCOME TO YOUR BRAIN
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hink your laptop is an impressive piece of technology? Well, let’s put it into context. Your brain is capable of 200 million billion calculations per second. Inside your skull sits a 1.3kg mass of extraordinary complex neural circuitry. Consisting of around 100 billion neurons, each with 1,000 connections and a firing rate of 200 calculations per second, this singular organ is responsible for your every move, behaviour and decision – and much of how it works remains a mystery. In terms of online psychology, it’s useful to think of the brain in terms of three metaphorical areas: the primal brain, the emotional brain and the rational brain. If you want to be truly successful in developing relationships with your customers online, you’ll need to target all three. The Primal Brain This comprises the brainstem, believed to be one of the most primitive structures in the brain. Common to all animals, the brainstem is responsible for our basic vital functions, such as breathing, digestion, heart rate and blood pressure, as well as sexual arousal. It keeps us alert and gives us the ‘fight or flight’ instinct that often takes over when we confront danger. Ways of stimulating the primal brain include the use of sex. In terms of financial brands, this would obviously
be subtle, such as images of healthy, attractive people. Food also works well in this context. So does contrast. Our ancestors had to make quick, stark decisions that often meant the difference between life and death – so contrasting images that provide choice appeal to our primal brain. This part of our brain is also interested in getting to the nitty gritty fast, and reacts with interest to talk of scarcity and ‘what’s in it for me?’ The Emotional Brain Our emotional system processes feelings such as happiness, sadness and disgust; it decides whether or not we trust someone’s face; it acts as an interchange for information passing from all the senses (except smell). This is the part of the brain that is susceptible to impulse buying – it’s interested in reward and risk-taking. It’s the part of you that says: ‘Yes, I will have that piece of chocolate cake.’ Effective ways to target the emotional brain include the use of empathy. That’s why so many websites use images of people having fun, although this can backfire as it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution – the cultural perceptions of your audience have to be addressed. Most of us have seen clumsy websites with a cheesy stock image of somebody smiling at us, and immediately felt put off. But when it’s done well,
1.3kg
CONSISTING OF AROUND
100 BILLION
NEURONS EACH WITH
1,000 200
CONNECTIONS AND A FIRING RATE OF
CALCULATIONS PER SECOND
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its very effective on a sub-conscious level. Another technique that very much appeals to the emotional brain is storytelling – one of the oldest, most powerful forms of communication (see opposite). People are very receptive to hearing stories, they understand how they work and their brains rapidly tune in. That explains how great orators use stories to rouse entire nations into acts of incredible violence or love. The Rational Brain This is the system that helps us to plan, organise and solve problems. It’s open to social learning, language, abstract thought and imagination. The rational brain comprises the neocortex, the defining feature that sets us apart from other mammals. But what makes us really special is the combined interaction between different regions. Most of us like to think we make logical decisions all the time. The reality is that we make instinctive judgements and then use logic to post-rationalise and justify our gut feelings. This is where the rational brain kicks in, looking for evidence to back our judgement. Financial brands often focus largely on appealing to the rational brain (‘this is why you should invest in this product’), but a far more effective approach is to target all three regions together.
WORDS Fraser Allen ILLUSTRATION Andrew Gibbs
I WANT TO TELL YOU A STORY Why has ‘storytelling’ become such a big deal in comms and marketing circles, and what are the key ingredients of a really successful storytelling campaign? If you’re sitting comfortably, Fraser Allen will begin
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t was a brisk autumn morning and brown leaves were kicking about in the courtyard as we arrived for the presentation. We walked towards the grey, concrete building clutching portfolio bags and silently rehearsing our lines. If you’ve ever pitched for business, you will understand the adrenalin-fuelled anticipation that accompanies these occasions. I was with two colleagues. We’d been invited by a large financial institution to pitch an idea to a senior executive who we’d never met before. When we arrived in his office, he was pacing around like a bear in a cage, deep in thought. Before we’d even had a chance to introduce ourselves, he turned to us and firmly but politely said: “Let me make one thing clear. I don’t want to hear your pitch, I want to hear your story.” Now, when you’re just about to launch into something you have prepared with great care, and something which can only really be described as ‘a pitch’ … that’s not what you want to hear. Billy Connolly once said that all Mexican food is the same, it’s just folded differently. So we did some quick refolding. Instead of turning a tortilla into a quesadilla, we turned our pitch into a story. It all ended happily ever after but what really struck us at the time was how the concept of storytelling had taken off even in this relatively conservative establishment. It was the story that counted, nothing else mattered. If you work in comms and marketing, you can’t escape talk of storytelling at the moment. It features in just about every conference going, and marketing consultants are suddenly reinventing themselves as ‘brand storytellers’. Even Coca-Cola (a moderately successful soft drink manufacturer based in the US) has repositioned itself as a ‘sharer of stories’. So what’s the big deal? After all, storytelling is something deeply human and instinctive that we all do every day and have done since before the dawn of civilisation. As the author Philip Pullman once put it: “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Well I have a theory, and it’s closely connected with the rapid change in communications technology that civilisation is currently swept up in. There is so much stuff going on around us. We’re surrounded by the constant buzz of digital communication but we lack the time to delve deep, so we snack on bites of information instead. We rush around, we want to look smart and sometimes we feel vulnerable. There’s a lot to take in and, as Nathalie Nahai explains on p15, that’s hard on our brain. The thirst for storytelling is a response to this unfamiliar noise that surrounds us. Many of us, probably all of us, yearn for an authoritative voice to emerge from the noise, sit us down by the campfire and put everything into context by telling us a story, using conventions we all understand. That’s why everyone seems to be talking about storytelling, and applying it to comms and marketing campaigns. And inevitably, some people are doing it really well, most people are doing it okay-ish, and some are doing it really badly. So how do you create a truly effective storytelling strategy? Well the first step is probably not to ask a comms or marketing consultant. The best people to ask are those who really know how to tell a great story: authors, scriptwriters, playwrights and even journalists. As a journalist myself, it’s creative thinkers like these that I turn to. Here are eight key ingredients of powerful storytelling that I’ve learned from them.
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THE STORY COMES FIRST – EVERYTHING ELSE IS JUST IMPLEMENTATION Technology gets people very excited but it can also be a dazzling distraction. Too much time, money and energy is often invested in the infrastructure – what a website looks like, the functionality, the branding and keeping all the stakeholders happy. Meanwhile, the most important thing – the story – gets squashed or overlooked. The concept of ‘content marketing’ has become big business in recent years, but it’s a strange phrase. ‘Content’ suggests filler. It suggests you build this big media machine and then stuff it with content. But that’s the wrong way round. The story must come first, then you find the best way to communicate it (or ‘market’ it). It’s so important to invest time, talent and experience in the story. That is the big difference between campaigns that are outstandingly effective … and the rest.
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MAKE SURE IT’S BLOODY INTERESTING
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MAKE YOUR STORY HUMAN
That’s obvious isn’t it? Then again, if it is obvious, why is there so much bad brand storytelling out there? A few years ago, a Pixar storyboard artist called Emma Coats wrote 22 rules for storytelling. One of her best rules was: “Why must you tell this story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off?” You’ve got to believe that your story is so interesting that people will love to hear it. If you don’t believe it, no one else is going to.
People relate to people. Not focus-grouped common denominators of cultural diversity, not shallow caricatures created to fit someone’s idea of ‘branded content’ but real people with something genuine to say. So flesh out the characters – people like quirky personal details. They like emotion. They like honesty.
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GET THE SHAPE RIGHT
The author Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he drew the basic shapes of stories as graphs – you can still see it on YouTube. Like all great writers, he knew that every story is underpinned by a strong structure. You’ve got to grab the reader’s attention, keep them on board and give them a satisfying ending.
This is helpful to know because people understand how these plots work – you can use the conventions of storytelling to your advantage.
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… THEN CHALLENGE THEM
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AUTHENTICITY IS YOUR FRIEND
EDIT YOUR STORY LIKE A WEASEL FEASTING ON A CHICKEN BONE Even the best storytellers need a good editor. The author Elmore Leonard famously wrote 10 Rules of Writing – a typically flippant manifesto that contained several pearls of wisdom. Perhaps the most famous was point number 10: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Great advice.
KNOW THE RULES …
There are lots of theories about how stories work. Here’s one by Chris Dee, one of the authors of the Batman stories. “The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey. The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt.” Christopher Booker came up with another theory that he turned into a massive doorstopper of a book called The Seven Basic Plots. In it, he argued that there are essentially just seven types of story. Here they are, together with an example of each one: ■■ Overcoming the Monster – James Bond ■■ Rags to Riches – Cinderella ■■ The Quest – Watership Down ■■ Voyage and Return – Alice in Wonderland ■■ Comedy – Much Ado About Nothing ■■ Tragedy – Macbeth ■■ Rebirth – Sleeping Beauty
Then again, every good story needs someone who has the courage to stand up and say: “Hang on a minute this is boring, why don’t we just blow up the fairy castle.” Sometimes rules are there to be broken. Another author, Stephen King, once wrote: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” And chance can play a valuable part. Put your story in places where accidents can happen.
Social media is placing more pressure on brands to be genuine in everything they say. There was a campaign for a whisky brand last year that was all about the authentic traditions of the whisky – the locally sourced water and barley, the history of the building, the old equipment and methods etc. But instead of using one of its own workers for the shoot, the whisky brand used a male model. The authenticity was lost. By contrast, being really confident about the authenticity of your story can be massively attractive. The chances are you may well have seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video, which gained more than 114 million views within just a month of its launch last year. It was a brilliant example of clever and authentic storytelling. And like anything really clever, it quickly spawned a rather good parody (also on YouTube). Suffice to say, you will find it if you search for the phrase ‘Dove Real Beauty #Balls’. And finally, don’t forget that you are a born storyteller too. It’s hard-wired into your emotional brain. As the academic Richard Kearney wrote: “There will always be someone there to say, ‘tell me a story’, and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.”
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Fraser Allen launched his first magazine when he was aged 14. Called The Alternative Voice, it was a crass combination of schoolboy humour and naïve politics. It did, however, make a small profit, something he has endeavoured to do since, making a career out of writing and storytelling. As well being Publisher of Poppy and the award-winning booze magazine Hot Rum Cow, Fraser is CEO of publishing agency White Light Media.
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