One of the big problems with this industry is it is not good at communicating despite the vast amounts of time, money and people thrown at the challenge.
Regulators tie product providers and advisers up in knots with what they can and cannot say, and compliance departments stifle what marketing and sales teams can say.
Unfortunately, even though so much of the industry is about selling, being able to sell is not the same as being able to communicate clearly. In fact, selling is often easier if you do not really explain how things work and just stick with telling people what they want to hear.
So, when one of the great communicators in the industry passes away it deserves to be noted. That man was Neil Mainland – you may have seen the notice in last week’s Investment Week.
Neil ran his own public relations company for a long time, Mainland PR, before merging just recently with another firm Broadgate, to create Broadgate Mainland. PR gets a bad reputation because those who do not know it immediately think of some kind of Alistair Campbell-esque spin doctors. But good PR is all about communicating fairly and clearly. It is not about getting journalists to believe lies or mistruths about clients but making sure the right information is correctly understood.
To do it properly requires integrity – and that is a word that permeated through everything Neil did. You might say ironically since Neil started his working life as a journalist – just like Alistair Campbell.
I first met Neil back in the 1980s, when he was an industrial correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and we both ended up covering the same story about someone who claimed he had been sacked from a Russian bank in London for being too left wing.
I was freelancing and Neil had a proper job, so he left the story to me because he realised I needed the money more and could sell it to lots of other newspapers. It was that kind of simple generosity and decency that set him apart, and was the start of a 25-year-plus working relationship and friendship.
Neil cared passionately about journalism and the integrity of journalism – an old-fashioned standard not widely prevalent – and he played his part by helping journalists and, as a result, their readers to understand the correct information.
Neil had lived with cancer, which eventually took him at the age of only 54, for a number of years. He would never have used the tabloid word “battled” to described how he dealt with it – that is too emotive and too trivial a word for such an experience.
We shared a common bond of having faced death – Neil with his cancer and me with my heart problems. When facing the end of your life head on and earlier than expected, it changes your perspective. You try and get your life in order and leave the right legacy.
Neil left this legacy for his family and those of us in the industry who worked with him. A true gentleman, a great communicator and one of life’s genuinely decent people. You are missed already.
Lawrence Gosling is the founding editor of Investment Week. His views are his own, any comments to him at lawrencegosling@sky.com
