Posts filed under 'financial services'
The credit crunch and UK financial attitudes
Trevor Harvey writes:
We have a longstanding segmentation which helps us, and our clients, to understand consumer attitudes to financial services, so we have used it to explore attitudes to the credit crunch. The segmentation tests for levels of involvement in financial provision, along with levels of risk one is willing to accept. (The current segment sizes are above, along with the original percentages when we first built it ten years ago.) ‘Pressured providers’, the largest segment, are engaged with their finances because they have to be.
The main finding from the analysis, which we wrote up for WARC, the World Advertising Research Center (subscription required, free trial available), after presenting it to clients, was that for two of the segment groups, the Pressured Providers and the Free Thinking Independents, debt was integral to their lifestyle. As I say in the WARC article,
attitudes towards debt, which have been built up through easy access and optimism, are not likely to dissipate… appetite for borrowing is unlikely to diminish in the two groups noted for driving the debt market. Pressured Providers will continue to need help because they have no other means of survival, and Free-Thinking Independents will continue to take as much as they’re given to help fund a lifestyle born of attitude rather than means.
Market conditions provide some constraints on the ability of financial services companies to provide loans. But there are also reputational risks in lending to people who are borrowing under pressure and who may struggle to repay.
Add comment 6 May 2008
Making markets for buyers
Trevor Harvey writes:
Springwise has an item this week on a new initiative (opens to Dutch web page) in the Netherlands whereby ING - one of the country’s largest banks - helps buyers makes offers for other people’s homes - even through the houses aren’t actually on the market. There have been similar schemes elsewhere.
They see it as further evidence that we’re moving towards Doc Searls‘ ‘intention economy‘, which is more interested in what buyers would like to buy rather than what producers want to sell. It’s an interesting idea, and since buyers are likely to have the money it cuts out a lot of marketing effort. But before we rush to declare a new dawn, there are some wrinkles. It seems to me that it opens up some privacy concerns - or even just straight nuisance calls; how long before there is a register akin to the Mail Preference Service for people who decline to be approached in this way? Most contract law, certainly in the UK, is based on sellers making an offer to which a buyer accedes. And the notion of the market seems deeply embedded in cultures throughout the world. There may be good social reasons why - for 10,000 years or so - the dominant sales model has been of sellers gathering their wares and buyers going to find them.
Add comment 28 February 2008
