Just before the Anzac Day long weekend an email arrived admonishing the media for its continued negative coverage of the financial planning industry. After setting out his firm’s credentials – all of which were first-class – the writer said: “I am surprised why and how people like us don’t get in the media, why it is the mainstream media pursues a scandal not the good news. Personally I am over it.”
The writer made many very good points, and the characteristics he described of his own firm are admirable, but they are not uncommon. There are a lot of extremely good practices. He’s right that these firms hardly ever make the news – and that is exactly as it should be. This is a situation where good news is no news.
It’s a perennial question as to why the mainstream media doesn’t report good news. In fact, it often does report good news, but it’s not always seen that way – though this may be a subject for another day.
The mainstream media and its practices are often indefensible but there are reasons that it does what it does. It doe not chase bad news per se; it almost always focuses on things that are unusual or unexpected, or which go contrary to popular understanding and belief about how something should work or happen. Events that have these characteristics are often perceived as “bad” news stories – but they can be perceived as “good”, too.
Just don’t crash
Even so, a barrage of “good” news will not win credibility and trust and the perception of professionalism for financial planning. Credibility and trust will be won inch by inch, slowly, over time, through a continued absence of “bad” news. Airlines don’t win trust and earn a reputation for safety issuing press releases or arranging interviews with captains about how they successfully landed a plane (you hear about the pilots when they land a plane even when it is falling to pieces around them). They win trust and earn their reputations by simply not crashing – day after day, month after month, year after year. Surgeons win trust and respect by routinely not killing people.
Eventually, a plane will crash or a patient will die, but the entire reputations are not tarnished as a result, because these events are very clearly the exceptions. Trust and respect and the status of a profession is won by the repetitive provision of high-quality, safe and reliable service. It’s boring, but that’s how it is.
If you’ve ever spent time looking at so-called “good news” websites, you may have realised that they’re dreadful. They’re full of articles about the funny things that pets do, grandmothers using virtual-reality goggles for the first time, or “ten ways to be more grateful” and so on – none of which is news, or even particularly interesting. These stories are fluff. Ephemera. Let’s not suggest that stories about financial planners should be lumped into this category. That would be humiliating, to say the least.
None of this helps, necessarily, with the original complaint about the mainstream media. And the media definitely has an effect. Rabo Direct reported recently that trust in financial planners has fallen by more than 25 per cent (11 percentage points) in the past year, with only 29 per cent of people saying they trust financial planners, down from 40 per cent. And it’s not hard to see why – check out this timeline and see how prominently financial planners feature. And that’s only since 2009.
On the other hand, RaboDirect found that 75 per cent of people who currently use an adviser trust that adviser. That trust stems from first-hand experience of what advisers do. Mind you, the flipside of the finding is that a quarter of financial planning clients don’t trust their planner. That’s another story.
When “bad” news is good
But in a perverse way, the continued reporting of bad news in financial planning can be seen as a positive thing. What state would the financial planning industry have descended into if a client emerged from an encounter with a planner and had all of their financial goals and objectives met – and this was considered exceptional?
Perhaps the best response to the perception of nothing but bad news is simply to continue delivering great service and producing brilliant results for clients. But it also requires a level of self-policing – so if poor practice is identified somewhere, it can be called out, and steps taken to rectify it or to expose the dud practitioner.
That’s what a profession does, by the way. It monitors and polices its own. It’s not about individual practitioners saying “I’m all right Jack – leave me alone”. A profession sets standards that are difficult to reach, and it pings those who don’t meet them.
So it requires not only meeting the highest professional standards in your own firm and practices, it also requires a commitment and a willingness to stand together and call out less-than-professional practice when you see it elsewhere.
Preferably before the media does.
