I’ve written about this before, but not for a while.  And anyway, I’ve written about everything before, or everything I know about financial services branding and marketing at any rate.

This is the second blog to be sparked by the Financial Services Forum session about customer experience, and how as things are currently organised there is very rarely any attempt to differentiate it:  as we said in the meeting, those involved are all preoccupied with moving along the axis that goes from “bad” to “good,” but hardly anyone pays any attention to the axis which goes from “generic” to “different.”

All this reminded me of a theory which I used to feel quite excited about, that the differentiation of many of the strongest brands flowed, directly or sometimes indirectly, from the personal idiosyncracies, beliefs and even in some cases prejudices of the people responsible for them (and, most often, the business’s founder/s).

I’ve written before, for example, about the way that the emphasis on nutrition and food value in the Mars Bar brand stems not from clever research insight into ways to help consumers feel less guilty about consuming them, but rather from the deeply-held personal views of the eccentric food scientist Forrest Mars, back in 1920s America, about the dietary benefits of chocolate.  Or how McDonald’s achieved a role as the family restaurant of choice in 1950s America because the founders happened to have a thing about cleanliness and hygiene which made McDonalds acceptable to families in a way that greasier burger joints could never be.

There are loads of other examples, from Anita Roddick’s ideas about beauty without cruelty which gave the original Body Shop much of its distinctiveness, through to IKEA’s obstinate determination to stick to their Swedishness even when expanding into markets where half their product names sound like swear words or skin conditions.

Yes, it’s true, I’ve said all of this before.  But what I hadn’t realised until now was the extent to which a large, growing and successful part of the external consultancy marketplace is spending all its energies in helping clients manage their customers’ experience at best without any regard to this kind of idiosyncracy, and at worst with a view to stamping it out wherever they can find it.

The result may be (I say “may” because I’m not at all sure) customer experience which is gradually getting a bit better, but it certainly isn’t customer experience which is getting any more different.

It would be unfair to blame the customer experience industry for not getting brand, or indeed for not getting idiosyncracy as a major component of brand.  It’s not a big issue in their world, or in the worlds of the clients who hire them.

Look at it the other way round, though and it’s a very different picture.  Customer experience is a huge thing in my world, and in the world of anyone who cares about brands in service industries.  It’s up to us to get our point of view across to the people who haven’t got it yet.

Actually, I think I may have had a bit of a road-to-Damascus moment – but in an entirely bad way, as any experience involving roads going anywhere near Damascus tends to be at the moment.

Exhibit A:  the universally-held belief held by people in my kind of line of work that brands in service industries like financial services are overwhelmingly experiential, and so are built in people’s minds out of the sum total of their experiences of the brand in question.

Exhibit B:  my own empirical observation, that while some financial services businesses provide good service, some are mediocre and many are terrible, hardly any provide a kind of service which could in any way be described as distinctive or specific to what their brand is supposed to stand for.  (There are a few exceptions to this, but not many.)

Exhibit C:  the observation by my old friend Christopher Brooks, agency man now turned customer experience consultant, at a Financial Services Forum event on this subject yesterday, that in his experience when FS businesses are working on aspects of their customers’ experience, “invariably brand simply isn’t at the table.”

Hmm.  Taken together, these exhibits are distinctly alarming.  At worst, they suggest that no-one important on the client side has ever bought a single word of what I’ve been saying for the last god-knows-how-many-years:  they simply don’t seem to accept that designing customers’ experiences in a brand-minded way is worth the bother.

Why is this?  Is it because they don’t accept that service-sector brands are indeed very largely experiential?  Is it because they just don’t care about their brands and can’t be bothered to build them?  Or is there a third reason which makes me feel a bit less miserable?

I think there might be. Imagine if you will a four-box grid about service quality, with the south/north axis going from “Bad” to “Good” and the west-east axis going from “Generic” to “Distinctive.”  My proposition – much confirmed, I must say, by the discussion at yesterday’s event – is that at most organisations, most of the time, the overwhelming priority seems to be to move up the bad/good axis, ironing out some of the truly abysmal service failings that are still endemic in our industry.

For as long as that’s the case, no-one is much worried about moving positively along the west/east dimension, building experiences which are distinctive, hard to copy and specifically designed to build the intended brand perceptions.  In short, when your inbound calls are waiting an hour or more to be answered, no-one’s too bothered about the tone of voice of the poor sod who eventually picks up the phone to another infuriated customer.

I get that – it makes perfect sense.  But, in my brand-centric terms, it’s still not ideal.  My preference – in heading towards that top-right box where we all want to be in four-box grids – would always be to move diagonally upwards.  Yes, move from bad to good by all means.  But, at the same time, move from generic to distinctive too.  In my book, brand considerations are always part of the agenda, even when you are dealing with abysmal service failures in urgent need of improvement.

It looks, though, as if those currently responsible aren’t seeing it that way, and this discovery gives me a useful sense of a focus – or a proposition – for my customer-experience-oriented activities.

And at the same time it gives me a nice clear objective for my lobbying on the subject – trying to find a place for that chair marked Brand at that Customer Experience table.