The other day I found myself wondering whether other business owners in other business sectors are subject to the same barrage of product marketing as we in financial services seem to face.
Do business owners in any other line of work have so many product providers with so many products competing for their attention and calls for them to retail their offerings to the public?
I am prepared to accept that the chief buyer at Sainsbury’s or Selfridges probably faces a barrage of marketing from all sorts of manufacturers who naturally have just the best possible items to sell, which will of course be exceptionally well-received by the end consumer, thus resulting in a nicely profitable transaction for wholesaler and retailer alike.
Those of you who know me of old will know that for donkeys’ years I have been saying that our product is advice, and I have sought to align my own practice and methods of working with the purveyors of knowledge in other professions, rather than the purveyors of products in a more traditional retail environment.
But I have also been persuaded of the parallels with medicine, where there is a twin role: the professional purveyor of knowledge twinned with the retailer of products to solve the customer’s problems.
And it is because the diagnosis without the prescription; the knowledge without the solution, is really only half the job, that we must still interact with product providers.
My earliest days in financial services occasionally required me to sit in on broker consultant sales meetings. As a result I know very well that what the salesman comes to show me is less to do with whatever is good for the end consumer and more to do with what that the marketing department has decided is good to showcase this month, and even more to do with ‘double credit on with profits until December’.
So while everyone is banging on about inducements, and making sure product providers do not tempt me to sell them my soul, providers should freely disclose what inducements are currently on offer to their business development teams.
Providers should freely disclose what inducements are currently on offer to their business development teamsThen I might be in a better position to judge whether the insistence that your platform, your income product, your model portfolios, or your retirement products have the client’s best interests at their heart, or whether I am simply the latest victim of your own internal sales drive, with Christmas bonuses at its heart.
