No Small Change: Why Financial Services Needs A New Kind Of Marketing, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of No Small Change: Why Financial Services Needs A New Kind Of Marketing, by Anthony Thomson and Lucian Camp available here.

A 13-point manifesto for a new financial services marketing model Anthony Thomson knows a thing or two about new and disruptive financial services, having co-founded and chaired first the ground-breaking Metro Bank and then the purely digital, app-based Atom Bank. And as a financial services marketing specialist for over 30 years, Lucian Camp has helped develop more new and innovative financial services propositions than anyone. Now they’ve put their heads together to write No Small Change, a passionate, opinionated and practical manifesto arguing that the fast-changing financial services world urgently needs to rethink the whole of its approach to marketing. Most of all, they propose that an increasingly digital, fintech-driven industry needs not just more marketing, but also better marketing to make sure it’s successfully identifying consumers’ real needs, and finding powerful and successful ways to engage with them. After detailing the forces of change that demand a new approach, the book then examines in 13 chapters what the key components of that new approach should look like. It takes a broad and multi-faceted perspective, exploring areas as diverse as the crisis of consumer trust, the ever-growing power of Big Data, the importance of leadership and corporate culture and the rapid advance in thinking based on Behavioural Economics.

There is a lot to like in this book, and the authors identify some clear reasons why the strategies they offer can give value and more effective campaigns. The footnotes are also worth reading too as they dig into some areas in interesting and insightful ways. One comment or reservation about the book is that in announcing that this is their first book the authors then manage to slightly get in their own way a little too often. Expressions along the lines of ‘well we think this and you are welcome to disagree’ could have perhaps benefitted from a stronger editing line to take out these moments of self doubt and just deliver their insights without the hedging. With this caveat considered the rest of the book offers useful ideas and they are clearly pushing on an open door in a sector which can do many things, perhaps almost everything, better than they have currently been managing to do.

In this context writing is something that could be a good medium for the authors to continue in, and therefore it will be interesting to see what else follows.

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