February 2008

Editors Letter
Optimism: The cure for what ails us Pat Atkinson

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt comfortable being American. For the past eight years, I’ve thought of myself as a refugee from a war-torn country. So much so that two years ago, I stood alongside a cross-section of other immigrants— many of whom were from ravaged nations like the Sudan and Zambia—and swore my allegiance to the Queen of England at a special citizenship celebration held in a trillium-dotted conservation area. Afterward, we ate fresh strawberries with whipped cream and swapped stories of our homelands.

My unease lifted last month with the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, a person who is en route to restoring my faith—and the world’s—in the office he holds and the country he leads. His cool head seems full of deep thoughts and strong convictions. His words engender hope, excitement and the expectation that everything will be all right. Together, we will work hard and although we will face obstacles, ultimately we will emerge intact. This is a message that people everywhere need to believe and spread freely. As marketers, this should be our mission, to actively promote optimism – the state of reacting to setbacks from a presumption of personal power. We have a vested interest in doing so because every plan, commitment and transaction is predicated on the belief that the future is friendly.

Martin Seligman is a world renowned psychologist, academic and best-selling author who has written more than 20 books and 170 articles on motivation and personality. Among his best known works are Authentic Happiness, The Optimistic Child, What You Can Change & What You Can’t, and Learned Optimism. Through his research, Dr. Seligman has discovered, among other things, that optimism has two basic dimensions: permanence and pervasiveness. Simply put, optimistic people tend to believe that bad events are temporary setbacks, which are isolated to particular circumstances and can be overcome by effort and abilities. (By contrast, pessimists react to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness. They tend to believe bad events will last a long time, undermine everything they do and are their fault.) Optimism has been shown to inoculate against depression, improve health, and in combination with talent and desire, enable achievement.

Such was the case in the 1980s when Seligman was retained by the president of Met Life to find a way to select more successful sales agents. Previously, half the new hires would quit within the first year, while the remainder gradually became less productive. Within four years of joining, 80 percent of new agents left Met Life—which resulted in its haemorrhaging money due to excessive hiring and training costs. The now famous psychologist scrutinized the company’s rigorous screening process, which relied heavily on an industry-standard test created by the life insurance industry, for clues. While the screening instrument did measure many traits, optimism was not among them. Seligman hypothesized that it required optimism for salespeople to overcome constant rejection. He improved the screening process by incorporating a test which measured aptitude, motivation and optimism and soon discovered that selling insurance required top-tier optimists. The rest, as they say, is history. Thereafter, Met Life began screening for optimism, increased its sales force to 12,000 agents and wound up boosting its market share of the personal insurance market by 50 percent. Conclusion: there are real, practical advantages to engaging in optimism, not the least of which are commercial.

Which leads me to this month’s focus: recession-proof marketing, and the retail sector. We have assembled a veritable compendium of forecasts, insights, recommendations and case studies for you from subject matter experts and thought leaders. All of these works are intended to underscore your power to make great things happen, no matter what the stock exchanges say.