Many years ago, back when I was an editor at Financial Planning magazine, I was assigned the happy task of keeping futurist and author Alvin Toffler company in the green room for about an hour before he went on as the keynote speaker at the IAFP (now FPA) national convention in New York.
Perhaps it only we older people who will remember Dr. Toffler as the first professional "futurist," (George Orwell and H. G. Wells notwithstanding), as the author of many books including: "Future Shock," "Power Shift," and "The Third Wave," which had just been published at the time of our meeting.
For me, it was a fascinating and educational conversation, from which my biggest takeaway was this: "Futurists don't know any more about the future than anyone else," Toffler told me, "but the good ones know a lot more about what's happening in the present." His comment made me realize that the real value we journalists add is to help people stay better informed about the present, so that they can make better decisions about the future.
Toward that end, in my blog last week (2015: They Were Doing What? Robos, Flat Fees and Fiduciary), I took a look back on the events of 2015 that had, in my view, the biggest impact on the independent advisory world: the rise of the Robos, and the resulting pressure on advisory fees; the resurrection of flat advisory fees; the lack of progress on a fiduciary standard for brokers; and the conundrum of the CFP Board and the movement toward state licensing of financial planners.
For my last blog of the year, I'd like to use that assessment about the present (and recent past) to take a look forward and speculate a bit on what the coming year might hold for the industry.
In light of the above-mentioned events and others, I'd sum up my vision for 2016 in the advisory industry as "The Year of Marketing." Yes, I'm well aware that, at least since I started covering the advisory world more than 30 years ago, every few years or so, someone comes out with their "reason" why independent advisors are finally going to have to start marketing. An, every time, they've been flat wrong. But despite all that, and even though it's a cliché, I do believe that this time, it really is different; and advisors really are going to have to start seriously marketing their services.
