The Biggest Bank Robbers are the Banks Themselves!

A nasty, thoroughly dishonest story is beginning to emerge about one of the biggest financial scams ever!

Which, in turn, gives an awful example of Top-Down-Management, and the total disregard and contempt it holds for its most important asset, you, its customer.

Firstly it is obvious that the Management of British Banks are incapable of knowing what its left hand is doing from its right. Because boy, have they just wasted millions of pounds, poured down the black hole of wasted Advertising and Marketing money!

And it is going to cost them many many millions more to try and attempt to restore the image of the British Banking System! If ever!

The facts?

Lets give you an example, say you had, inadvertently, gone overdrawn on your bank account by, lets say £5. The banks would, unlawfully I hasten to add, charge you anywhere between £30 and £40.

There is convincing documentary evidence that the bank's true costs is no more that £2 and normally far less. Their penalty charges produce a profit margin as much as 1700% (seventeen hundred percent), but the scary thing is that it is totally unlawful.

As the BBC recently reported there has been a massive consumer movement over the last year. Well over one million bank customers have challenged their banks on the legality of penalty charges and have reclaimed their money.

Despite this, the banks continue to resist claims. The banks continue to deny that they are breaking the law.

Banks continue to clog the courts with sham defences.

Banks continue to apply their unlawful penalty charges.

Each bank claims that it is acting in line with all of the other banks.

Despite all of this, despite mounting public pressure, despite mounting publicity, despite mounting condemnation from the financial ombudsman, the banks continue to defy authority.

Well done Top-Down-Management, well done Marketing Departments, you will now have plenty of excuses to go to your paymasters and beg for millions more money to squander down the black hole of one-way advertising… Together with lavish and beautifully produced direct mail brochures…all to no avail I hasten to add.

No amount of money will save you now, one-way glitz no longer works, especially when you have been accused of ripping off your customers big time.

They should manufacture a special Oscar, for the achievement of the best Top-Down-Management financial scam ever! A sort of lifetime award!

No amount of PR; Advertising; Direct Marketing will ever change the attitudes of the thousands who have been ripped off.

So advertise away…spend millions more of our money trying to cover up your dirty deeds and regain our confidence…what a laugh because you never will regain our confidence – ever.

Additionally the BBC (the poacher turned gamekeeper!) in a nine month investigation working undercover in a leading British Bank revealed a culture of ruthlessness and lies which will shock their customers.

For example: "With a touch of glee, my bank trainer told a classroom of call centre trainees that he "loved" getting customers complaining about bank charges".

"They'd phone up, start crying and blaming you and telling you their kids are going to starve. And I'd be like, 'I don't know you – I don't care. I was just thinking you're not getting it back. I was a right git."

And I have in front of me a marketing magazine article "The age of audience participation".

And this is from Barclays Bank, one of England's leading financial institutions,

who obviously must have the very finest example of Top-Down-Management at its worst.

In an age when technology is supposed to be allowing us to get closer to customers there is evidence of a very cynical attitude towards the customers and their money. One of the Barclays people said "I hate it when they say the customer is always right. It's just ridiculous. Someone was stoned when they made up that policy."

Hey Barclays Marketing Department, there goes a few more millions of your (wasted) efforts. Boys are you going to have to find ways to rectify all this mess. The customers are always wrong…right?

Could it possibly be that in this era of high growth and higher education, that more and more people are entering into marketing communications with absolutely no idea of the process of communication, no idea or concept of customer acquisition and retention.

Certainly, given the evidence here, they have no concept of service. And I've just finished reading a book called, "Service, Service, Service"! Ain't no such thing!

There is more, a hideous story after story of dreadful client mistreatment and rampant dishonesty, it makes me ashamed of the whole of the British Advertising and Marketing community, and, more worrying than that, these attitudes to me, demonstrate the decline and fall of the British economy!

Of course I have more to say, how to solve this crisis in inefficient Top-Down-Management, how to tackle the problems from an interactive marketing communications standpoint and much more. But that's later…much later because more of this dreadful story is still to emerge sad to say!