Long-termism in Loyaty

I opened a bank account with Midland Bank in 1989 and I fondly remember getting a dictionary, some stationary, and a nylon bag.

I still have the bank account ( now with HSBC) and they've probably made around 20,000 times back their investment in me and they still own half of my house, but I'm a happy customer. 

We're still more likely to get divorced than change bank account. We often add new neobanks to our portfolios as "digital piggy banks", but rarely as our "real" account. We're not going to get a Mortgage with an outfit just because it's got debit cards rotated 90 degrees. 

And yet today, seemingly no banks offer young savers pencils, set squares, dictionaries or anything for that matter. 

I'd guess the problem is this ROI is quite hard to calculate, very hard to attribute and it took a long time. For about 10 years they made nothing from me. My £2 paper-round income and later my £2 per hour village shop wage, didn't really look that good on their quarterly earnings calls. 

We've become absolutely obsessed with short-termism in marketing and the idea of direct attribution.

- We keep shifting money down the purchase funnel, away from anything brand related and closer to the point of purchase, not because it works better, but because it works faster and it's easier to claim success.

- In fact these days last touch attrition means we're more likely to do something that DOESN'T work, but appears to, than something we KNOW works but we can't easily and directly track, hence the love of digital media and online eCommerce.

-The race in marketing is now on investment to show success, not make it, we're talking a lot about the ideal of "closing the loop" which is the idea that Walmart if they own Vizeo, can show to brands that it was their TV ad for Head and Shoulders or Pedigree or Pepsi that made me buy it, which is utterly preposterous.

Any tour around any persons house will reveal about 1-10,000 brands, most of these people have NO idea why they bought what they did, but likely all products bought will have been the result of thousands of tiny moments. Each alone being meaningless, but together being powerful.

At some point we may have to fall in love with the idea of doing things we know work, but we won't know how, or when, and take comfort from the knowledge we have good judgement, not good tracking or gross impatience.