Advice That Sticks. Moira Somers

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СКАЧАТЬ particular guild. It was all proprietary – for tattoo artists and stockbrokers, for welders and insurance salespeople.

      Technology has changed all that. With every day that passes, the amount of secret or proprietary information shrinks, and what is considered ‘public domain’ grows. Access to knowledge and products or supplies is steadily being democratized. Want to know the brand of knickers favoured by the Queen? Keen to discover how to get slugs off your lettuce plants? Need access to a trading platform so you can buy some penny mining stocks? It’s all available in seconds with some clicks of a mouse.

      I’m not meaning to be indelicate here, but given the above-mentioned changes, the question needs to be asked: What good are you, anyway? Well, a lot of good, as it turns out. Let’s turn to the reasons consumers give when asked why they turn to experts – financial and otherwise.

      Why consumers turn to the experts

      As you read through the following aims that consumers have in seeking help, give some thought to how you might integrate this knowledge into both your marketing and promotion efforts as well as your service delivery.

      To reduce complexity

      Because of an inherent belief that more knowledge = better decision making, many people now make a point of gathering copious amounts of information on the problem they’re trying to solve. It is not uncommon for customers and clients to show up with tomes of research they’ve gathered, eager to discuss their findings. But the gathering of information does not automatically turn consumers into experts, particularly when the domain is highly technical and complex. (Just ask any physician who has had to tangle with a patient armed with WebMD diagnoses and treatment possibilities.)

      What true experts are able to do is judge the credibility and utility of the available information in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. It takes expertise to accurately classify material as Meaningful versus Irrelevant versus Unmitigated Rubbish. The non-expert does not know how to weigh the relative merits of the information he or she possesses. The loudest voices or the websites with the highest rankings are given too much weight and awarded too much credibility. As a result, material that is useless or plain wrong often has too much influence on the consumer.

      Experts help to cut through the noise and locate the signal. This is especially valuable to people who are faced with options that are difficult to compare. Such difficulty can come about because the choices are so similar (e.g. this socially responsible mutual fund versus that other socially responsible mutual fund), or because the choices are so dissimilar (e.g. whether to use monies to launch a new business venture or to enter retirement). The more emotionally impactful the decisions, the more the expert’s value lies in reducing the volume of information and its associated complexity.

      To take action

      ‘Keep your options open’ is a piece of advice we frequently give to teenagers as they consider which courses to take or which opportunities to pursue. It bespeaks our belief that more options = greater happiness.

      People like options, it’s true, but they frequently freeze up or bow out when faced with too many of them. One of the cleverest illustrations of that tendency comes from a now-famous supermarket study conducted by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in 2000.⁵ Grocery store shoppers came upon a display that contained at different times either 6 or 24 different varieties of jams that they could sample. More variety led to a greater volume of jam sampling, but when the researchers looked at which display led to the greatest volume of jam sales, they found it was the one that offered less choice. The difference, in fact, was startling. Only 3% of customers bought jam after being exposed to 24 options, whereas 30% of visitors to the 6-variety display made a purchase.

      The authors attributed the difference to a kind of decisional paralysis that set in as a result of having too many possibilities to sift through. The study spawned dozens of additional ones that sought to explore the conditions under which more options = less action. It has come to inform the field of consumer psychology and has led to changes in merchandising displays. Similar findings have been found in other aspects of human behaviour. For example, lonely hearts are more likely to go on dates when given an array of eight potential partners to select from than when they are shown an array of 20. Whether we’re choosing sweet toppings or sweethearts, it seems we act more decisively when the options are constrained.

      A similar phenomenon exists in the world of personal finance, where people often need help to move from mere contemplation into action.⁶ You may be familiar with the ‘snowball’ method of debt repayment (made famous by radio host Dave Ramsey) or the ‘envelope’ method of keeping household expenses in check (made famous by your grandma). One of the reasons for the popularity of such basic approaches to financial management is that they reduce complexity and get people into action quickly. For folks who have been frozen by indecision or overwhelmed at the prospect of where to begin, these simple guidelines offer a quick, safe way to get moving in the direction of financial well-being. ‘Getting going’ leads to considerable spin-off effects in confidence and optimism, and increases the likelihood of similarly desirable behaviour changes in the future.

      To save time

      You could easily call up a YouTube video and learn all about chicken husbandry; even so, I’ll bet you would prefer to buy a tray of chicken wings over raising poultry in your back yard. And notwithstanding the fact that you could readily find a manual for your particular model of car, I suspect you would rather pay a mechanic to swap out your transmission than be stuck underneath the car for days on end. Most of us will gratefully pay for help that saves us time.

      Expert financial advice saves time for people who are too busy, too unskilled, too stymied, or too uninterested to do things for themselves. The timesaving frequently far exceeds just the obvious, up-front benefit. For example, by taking his business taxes to an accountant, it is evident that Fred (a self-employed musician) saves himself an initial eight or ten hours of poring over instructions and filling out forms. What is less evident are the other ways in which Fred has saved time, e.g. by not having to buy his wife flowers to make up for his grumpiness, by not having to meet with personnel from the federal taxation bureau to explain all the errors he undoubtedly would have made, etc. Some of the most important time savings are the ones your clients may never even be aware that you’ve given them. When developing marketing materials, be sure to include the time-saving benefits of your services.

      To offload unpleasantness

      This reason is closely related to the previous point. Having access to expertise goes beyond cost–benefit analyses involving the relative value of our time versus someone else’s. Access to expertise reduces both stress and drudgery. It’s not just that I would find transmission-swapping and chicken-wrangling to be time-consuming – I would also find them to be difficult, dirty and downright yucky tasks.

      In 1993, lifestyle pioneers Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin published a book that would become one of the iconic, counter-cultural financial advice books of the last century. In Your Money or Your Life, they wrote about the exchange that people make to earn a living: namely, life energy (predominantly in the form of time and talent) in exchange for money. They challenged readers to think more deeply about that transaction, ensuring that the exchange of time for money was truly worth it to them.

      Since that book was first published, there has been much scholarly research done to try and elucidate the connection between money and life satisfaction. The findings are clear that there is a positive correlation between the two. The offloading of unpleasant activities contributes significantly to that correlation. Having disposable income allows people to hire others to do those things they’d rather not do themselves. And since ‘Dealing with finances’ is right up there with ‘Having СКАЧАТЬ