Texting may seem impersonal to many, but it’s a lot more personal than a conversation with millions of people at once through a television screen or newspaper – perhaps the financial services industry can take a lead from US presidential candidate Barack Obama.

As a backdrop, almost a decade ago a small group of American marketers led by internet start up operator Rick Levine published a book called the Clue Train Manifesto.

The book contends, among other things, that marketing is essentially manufacturers learning to have conversations with their markets.

To be honest the book is dense and in some cases high handed (it even contains 95 so-called manifestos in a clear rip-off of the protestant manifestos that Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg), but its message is simple and clear – if you want people to buy your product or service – then you need to be able to have a conversation with them.

The idea essentially distils down to this – if you want to make people interested in what you have to say about your product when you are trying to sell it then you have to:

1. Attract them to your message (that is say something – worth listening to)

2. Listen to what they have to say about it – build a system for understanding what they think of you and use it to inform your business

3. Watch what they do after you transmit your message

4. Modify your message to be more successful

And do this quickly.

Unfortunately that’s not the way financial services marketing works – at the moment in Australia and in most western countries the big dollars in marketing get wedded to a single big idea and then that idea is followed whether or not it is having the desired effect until next year’s marketing budget is introduced.

To do this, businesses regularly spend millions of dollars developing an idea for an advertising campaign, millions of dollars producing it as a TV spot and then millions of dollars buying air time on television – sometimes up to a year in advance – and then frankly, hope it works because it if doesn’t they are likely to get fired.

This essentially means that groups are incapable of having any sort of deep and ongoing conversation with their market at all – they are merely making statements and delivering messages without any true sense of engagement with customers.

You may have read this week the plan of US presidential candidate Barack Obama to text his supporters with details of who his running mate will be – rather than announce it to the media first.

This type of behaviour is the sort of quirky but relationship-forming activities financial services groups need to innovate on if they are truly serious about getting closer to customers.

At the moment though it seems fixed and slow moving campaigns are the order of the day.

Here at CoreData-brandmanagement we recently conducted a series of 20 Australia-wide focus groups as part of a large project on banking – participants were asked at the end of the sessions if they could recall bank advertisements that stood out from them.

They did and this is what the common responses were by group:

ANZ – The Falcon

CBA – The One with the Koalas

ING – Billy Connolly

NAB – The bikie in the shower singing

St George – The monopoly board

Westpac – Environment

Yes it’s a blunt instrument and yes it wasn’t the purpose of the focus groups but just something we wanted to test.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting that from 160 people who had spent over two hours talking about banks very, very few could articulate what any of them actually stood for.