Welcome back, siblings, to this brief midweek reprieve from the endless cycle of unpleasantness that is Out There. In here it’s warm, the felines are friendly, and we have biscuits. Actually that’s untrue on two counts; the felines can be a bit growly sometimes and we’re out of biscuits. But it’s warm, and it’s still better than out there. 

I’m writing this, comme d’hab, on Tuesday night and I must admit to feeling a little nervous, because tomorrow I am going to go and do a session for a bunch of marketing students at Edinburgh University Business School who have, inexplicably, elected to do a financial services module. Happily for them they have a number of excellent tutors; less happily they get me for a couple of hours tomorrow, or today when you read this.  

I’ve looked at what these people are doing, and lots of it is very interesting; particularly the parts aimed at financial inclusion; they even have a special extended element on credit unions. But what they don’t have is any exposure to wealth, pensions or long-term savings and investment, which I suppose is where I come in tomorrow and I can only apologise to them in advance. 

This afternoon was putting-the-session-together time and it ended up being more of a headscratcher than I thought it would be. The basic tenets of how to Do Marketing (“what’s that strange man doing, Mummy?” “Shush, Timmy, he’s doing marketing, don’t move or you’ll scare him away!” “But Mummy, it looks like he’s just sitting there doing nothing and hoping no-one notices.” “Exactly, Timmy, exactly.”) remain pretty constant and they are these: marketing is the act of matching stuff up with people who want the stuff you’re marketing, so in order to do it well you have to understand the stuff and you have to understand the people. That’s basic, but you would be stunned, stunned I tell you, at how often it gets overlooked. 

I may have told this story before, but I remember doing a session some years ago for an industry marketing team who had a platform to sell, and as I whanged on about whether their portfolio rebalancing tool was in line with adviser expectations or whatever, I noticed that many of them were more than normally dissociated; souls were leaving bodies at a fair old clip. So I interrupted my flow of great genius to find out what was the matter, and it turns out that many of them didn’t know what portfolio rebalancing was, and not only that but they didn’t know where it was in their platform, and not only that but they hadn’t used the platform and not only that but about a third of them had never even had a demo of the platform that they were trying to sell. I suggested humbly that their job would be made quite a lot easier if they had the slightest clue what it is they were doing, and they agreed, and words were had upstairs, and strangely I never got invited back again.  

I might tell that story tomorrow. Anyway, the point of all this is that getting prepped has forced me to think about what it is I want this poor bunch of young people to learn about the particular part of showbusiness we all call home, and how to go about that without frightening them all off, because we do need marketeers in this game, despite what many of you are saying at exactly this moment. We need them because whereas salespeople are brilliant at dealing with what is in front of them at that time and making the most of whatever situation they find themselves in, marketeers are expected to take a longer view; to study up and to think around corners. Pretty much every development that’s been genuinely useful in our game since forever comes from people thinking exactly that way, whether they’ve got ‘marketing’ in their job title or not.  

I’m giving them a quote I like from Rory Sutherland: “we are too impatient to be intelligent. Intelligence and wisdom is slow whereas ‘seeming logic’ is fast.” It’s worth taking your time to really understand what you’re doing; in fact that might be the best use of time there is. And because I flat refuse to do sessions without a Vonnegut quote they’re also getting “Thinking the guy up ahead knows what he’s doing is the most dangerous religion there is.” How often have we seen pointless developments replicated across the sector just because of groupthink?  

So they need to think round corners. But still: what should I tell them of what we do? What would you do? I think I’ll talk a little about how concentrated wealth is in this country, and how important financial planners are. I’ll try to help them understand that the way you ‘buy’ products on behalf of clients has more to do with enterprise selling than sticking an ad up with a rate on it and hoping for the best. I’ll talk about jeopardy; getting your marketing wrong if you’re selling shoes mainly will simply lead to a suboptimal footwear experience, but if your all-new pension investment option is a pup then it’s people’s futures at risk. And I’ll tell them that, miraculously, something in the order of £5trn rattles around the retail investment and pension markets, and the people who own it are nice enough to let you and me and maybe 20 students from Edinburgh Business School take a very tiny part of that and make a living.  

And then I’ll give them a case study on creating a campaign for a new decumulation product, just because I can. The power! 

Your music choice this week is ten minutes of Scottish folk black metal…actually no, it’s not even though there is a new Saor record out. But I find myself listening to the latest Afghan Whigs record on repeat, so here’s House of I and I hope you like it.