I think that literally everyone I know has heard me sing the praises of “the best direct marketing letter I’ve ever received” (the one from the small employee benefits consultancy specialising in the agency world whose letter to me began:  “Dear Mr Camp, Have You Ever Wondered How Much Other Creative Directors Earn”).

If you can’t see why that’s an absolutely perfect first line, then, well, please don’t bother asking me for a job as a planner or as a copywriter.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever read another first line as good as that, and other pretty decent examples tend to pale into insignificance beside it.  But still, I received my home insurance renewal pack from MORE TH>N yesterday, and – considering that this is the moment of greatest threat to their customer relationships, when something like a third of us are likely to be so shocked by the renewal quote that we go rushing off to GoCompare.com – I thought that “Dear Mr Camp, Welcome To Another Year Of Home Insurance With MORE TH>N” wasn’t a bad effort at damping down people’s smouldering disloyalty.

Mind you, speaking for myself, I’m still seething with injustice at the way they fired us a couple of years ago and replaced our excellent Lucky The Dog advertising with a series of useless and boring campaigns so lacking in any kind of distinctiveness that I honestly can’t think of a shorthand phrase to use to remind you of them.  Despite their well-crafted first line, I think I might go and spend a few minutes on GoCompare.com – for purely personal reasons.

I remember writing a piece ages ago mourning the death of the mass market brand development opportunity.  “All that’s left now are niche markets,” I said.  The days when you could find enough uncrowded space to build a Nescafe, or a Persil, or a Ford Focus, or a Carling, or a Head’n’Shoulders, have gone.  It’s all about Fairtrade coffee, or Bulgarian lager, or washing powder designed for a particular kind of fabric, or for washing at exceptionally low temperatures.

I did have the sense to recognise that things were different in new markets.  I was writing, as I recall, in the early days of mobile phones, and I think I acknowledged that Vodafone and Orange might catch on, although I wouldn’t be surprised if I said that the obvious long-term mass-market winner would be Cellnet.   Fifteen or twenty years later, there are plenty of other examples – many in markets driven by new technology (iPod, eBay, Amazon) and quite a few in categories created through other kinds of innovation (easyJet, Magners, Innocent).

But still, there was one big exception that I missed – one very big, long-established, mainstream consumer sector where, for many years, no-one, or almost no-one, has been interested in addressing the mass market.

I’m talking, of course, about financial advice.  Only a tiny minority of IFAs are remotely interested in people on, say, average earnings;  there are literally only a couple of mass-market-focused tied sales forces still in business;  and although people have been saying for years that the high street banks and building societies represent the obvious route into the mass consumer market, the only thing that’s obvious today is that most of them are still only ready, and/or willing, and/or able, to play a half-hearted and largely ineffectual role in this area.

There is, of course – or at least there has been – a good reason why this near-void has existed:  regulation.  Largely by controlling the prices that firms are able to charge to serve this market, the FSA has made traditional approaches based on face-to-face communication hopelessly unprofitable. 

This can’t go on.  In a world where – as I’ve argued on many recent occasions – mass-market consumers bear a heavier responsibility for their long-term financial wellbeing than they have for a hundred years or so, it’s absurd and unacceptable that so few organisations have any interest at all in helping them meet these responsibilities.  Things are slowly changing.  The Internet can deal with some of the cost issues.  The regulator is beginning to realise that the current regime is counterproductive.  The Thoresen Review’s Money Guidance service looks interesting.  One way or another, the pieces that could make up a solution are starting to come into alignment.  But for the time being, the last big empty market is still an extraordinary anomaly in our overcrowded world. 

With this week’s troubles at Bradford & Bingley following on a few months behind the rather more serious damage done to Northern Rock – and with Alliance & Leicester widely claimed to be an accident waiting to happen – the enthusiasm in recent years for demutualisation among mid-sized building societies is looking more and more misplaced.

I think I said at the time that knowing what you don’t want to be – a building society – isn’t a strategy until you also know what you do want to be.  Too small and weak to compete head-on with the big boys of the High Street, these mid-tier organisations were driven more or less inescapably into roles as the retail financial market’s bottom-feeders, specialising in the deals that their bigger and stronger rivals didn’t want.  That may have looked like a reasonably cunning plan during the nice decade – especially in a situation where they weren’t exactly over-run with alternatives.  But as we move into th nasty decade, it becomes clear why others chose not to specialise in bad risks:  even without specialising, some bigger players have found they have more than enough rubbish on their books for comfort.

You can’t help feeling sorry for the customers of the floundering mid-tier, not least because one of them is my father in law who has all his cash savings in B&B.  But as a strong believer in the principle and practice of mutuality, and as an agency man who’s proud to include Nationwide among our biggest clients, I can’t feel too sorry for the greedy and blinkered managements responsible for leading their organisations into no-man’s-land.