A lot of the communications I see in the Financial Services space make me feel very little on a personal level, and so on a professional level really worry me. In a busy world and with information overload, how can we expect to cut through if it makes people feel nothing? It makes me wonder how the people who produced this work felt about it while it was going through the process from brief to fruition – and was it a painful one? If it wasn’t and they’re happy, well then…

Now we have to be honest that production processes, deadlines and stakeholder management are always to some extent stressful and may turn our feelings against the piece of work we are producing. But when you first set out, how did you feel about the concept that was going into production? Did it make you excited? Was it beautiful? Were you optimistic that it would make a real difference? Did you feel a bit nervous? Did it feel like a bit of a risk? I have a horrible feeling that a lot of communications at the concept stage fall into the bracket for those who are running them of feeling like – “I’ve done my job; got through that meeting and no one has shot it down”… “phew”. That feeling isn’t going to do much for your target audience.

Now, I am lucky enough to work with a team who do produce things that give me strong positive feelings and clients who more often than not feel the same. I always walk out of concept reviews thinking there’s stuff in there that is really exciting, beautiful or daring, and more often than not I feel that way about more than one of those. I hope clients feel the same. And therein lies my question: can we as marketers honestly expect to really engage our audience with our communications, in a sea of information, if we don’t feel it or care when we see it? We have to look at what we produce, we have no choice, but do we genuinely start the process wanting to look at it? And do we end the process feeling similarly? Fundamentally if we’re not “feeling it” on a bit of work from inception can we expect a target audience to? If not, that’s more than a little bit worrying.