Give the people what they want

There has been a distinct change in our society’s social contract. Especially since the drastic increase in market volatility which started in 2008. The old deal we’d all signed up for is over and the bigger companies – in particular the large financial services companies – are having a great deal of trouble accepting this.

The old fairly unilateral social contract

‘Large Financial Company’ (or any large company for that matter) – We have a huge advertising budget. We can afford to pay the best agency to come up with the most creative, effective advertisement. We will try to control what the consumer thinks about us and encourage them to buy our products, services.

The biggest wallet wins.

The new more bilateral social contract

Consumer – You [large companies] will give us what we want or we will not buy your products. Even worse, we will – by the very act of not supporting your product- influence our social circles to turn away from your products too.

We will tell you what we want through various forums including research studies, customer surveys and in particular through social media. We do not want you to just advertise that you provide what we want. We want you to actually provide it. If you try to mislead us, we will announce that fact on our social networks.

Members of our social network informing us about poor experiences with you will carry far more weight than any ad you can buy. If you want us to buy your products, take on your brand and promote you to our friends, family and colleagues…you’d better listen to us. If you give us what we want not only will we happily hand over our cash but we will influence our socialgraph recommending they do business with you as well.

Those who listen will not only survive but they will thrive. Here, the loudest unified voices and all of their wallets win.

At the very tops of their lungs our clients, potential clients are screaming at our industry with every stat, every study and with every blog post…Give us what we want! Give us what we are asking for! Give us what we need!

And how do some of the big behemoths in the money business answer this plea? They create commercials about experiences most people are never going to have working with them.

They make ads focused on the importance of the financial plan when in reality very few of their advisors/bankers/consultants provide such a service. They offer software as part of your banking to track spending but don’t train their staff or advisors to give any advice about what to do with that information.

In a recent CIBC poll Canadians identified their top three financial priorities. They were as follows:

• 1. Paying down debt (14%)
• 2. Saving for retirement (13%)
• 3. Managing day-to-day spending (12%)

It was no surprise to anyone that those aged 25-44 place top priority on debt repayment with advice about their mortgage and building savings coming in for joint second priority. Again, not surprisingly those 45-64 placed saving for retirement in first place with paying down debt a distant second.

What I think was surprising to many is that those over 65 said managing day-to-day spending as their top priority with a whopping 22%.

What this tells me is if we can help those in the pre-retirement category 45-64 pay down debt while saving for retirement day-to-day spending will be easier to manage at 65. You see the only way for most of that 45-64 year old age group to save more and pay back liabilities faster is to make management of day-to-day spending a part of their financial plan now.

Once the survey identified the participants’ top priorities they then asked them what comes to mind when thinking about meeting with a financial advisor.

Their responses were as follows:

• Retirement planning (27%)
• Investment advice (22%)
• Debt reduction (4%)
• Cash flow management (5%)

Do you see what I see?

The people clearly say what it is that is important to them when it comes to their money and they don’t think of us as the people to give it to them. The demand is clearly there for advice on debt and cash flow management but the supply is fairly scarce.

Now, I’m no economist but I’m pretty sure that large demand combined low supply equals opportunity.

There are two things I want you to take from this piece.

1. We must hold the companies we work for or whose products we use to the image they are portraying to the public. If the company you are contracted with is putting out ads about their retirement income planning offerings you’d better be getting both the support and encouragement –better yet be required- to put those plans in place. If that is not happening, make some noise!

Turn that same logic on yourself and your own marketing. If your website says “financial plan” 15 times but you haven’t done a written plan in ages and less than 50% of your clients have one, perhaps you post that on your site. Maybe you should focus on something you really excel at rather than promote something you don’t really want to deliver.

Always market the truth.

2. The people have told you what they want. Find a way to make sure you can offer it to them. This could mean you that take on this task yourself and add it to your process or you reach out to those professionals around you to see if you can partner up with an advisor who really wants to offer debt and cash flow management.

Carpe diem people! Give the people what they want!