Money can buy you happiness it seems
I read an article on the SMH site a little while ago about a jackpot winning family in the UK who were ditching the mansion they had bought in favour of a smaller home. The Chester family’s decision stemmed, it seems, from a sense of disconnect – from their children (“In a small house you are always all together. Now I have to make a point of finding them – we don’t even watch TV together as we are all in different rooms.”), and disconnect from their neighbours (“This isn’t the sort of place where people pop in, and it’s not as if we can chat over the back fence.”)
The story filled me with a (fleeting) comforting smugness that I would most probably never win the lottery.
The observation that money can’t buy happiness is not revolutionary but the story presented a scenario of such relevant simplicity I was compelled to take a deeper look at this old adage – not least as it presents an interesting challenge for those of us in the business of selling stuff.
At one end of the spectrum it is suggested that money does not only fail to buy happiness, it can downright contribute to making you unhappy. A new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science, (and discussed by Jonah Lehrer in his Frontal Cortex blog on wired.com) suggests the more we are able to afford the best things in life, the less able we become to appreciate the mundane ‘everyday’ joys life has to offer. In effect, we desensitise ourselves to the majority of our life experiences and become sad.
University of Colombia Professor E.W. Dunn takes a more positive approach in her paper titled “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right.” In a nutshell, she elaborates on research that shows spending money on experiences can actually increase your level of long-term happiness.
This formula does not suggest ‘the bigger the experience the happier you become’ because if you pass the tipping point you may risk encountering the ‘hedonic adaptation’ as proposed by our Belgian psychologists. Instead, scholars have discovered that buying many small pleasures is your best bet for buying happiness.
There are many reasons why experiences make us happy (ie. sense of achievement, personal development, etc) but the one I feel is most vital – and most pertinent in my review of the Chester family’s predicament – is that experiences offer us opportunities to strengthen social bonds.
This is congruent with post-GFC studies that show a recent seismic shift in consumer behaviour – people are craving a greater sense of connectedness and deeper personal relationships. Experiences deliver opportunities to share, relate, recommend and reminisce.
What’s more, in a modern urban society where systems of community have largely been disbanded, experiences are often the only opportunities people have to actively interact and engage in shared interests with others. This is perhaps also why many small experiences deliver the most joy as the result is similar to building a sense of community.
So we have learned the Chesters would have been better off spending their $15 million on weekend excursions and pottery classes but what should we take away from this as marketers?
Here are some questions we could be asking ourselves: why do communities matter and how do we build one?
In Guy Kawasaki’s blog “Changing the World”, he writes that the first rule in the art of creating community is to create something worth building a community around – “Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried.”
As brand builders we need to understand our brand truth in context of the human world. We need to ensure we are creating something worth engaging with, that our products create or enhance experiences, and that these qualities are authentic. In achieving this we will sell experiences and not just products – and experiences make you happy 
