Rohit was doing some “Monday morning quarterbacking” of his own, but he was more focused on the ads: specifically, what they were trying to accomplish from a strategy standpoint, and how they aligned with some larger trends he’s identified recently.

“You always see Super Bowl ads kind of turning back the clock and casting people that we recognize from the past. You had Burger King using Andy Warhol, Bo Jackson, Sarah Jessica Parker. All of those align to a trend that I called ‘retro trust,’ this idea that in a world where it’s really hard to know what to trust, many smart people are kind of turning that clock backwards and saying, ‘Well, we trust in our past. We trust in the things that we recognize from when we were younger.’”

It’s probably not surprising that we respond to these kinds of ads given how much multimedia manipulation we have to deal with these days. Rohit says that retro trust can provide a shortcut through all that noise for our brains because, “if I recognize it, then perhaps I might trust it.”

This is one reason that the Life-Centered Planning process involves asking questions about clients’ money memories. The advisor gains insight into why clients behave the way they do around money, but also the client reconnects to those formative — you might say “retro”—experiences. Building a financial plan around an understanding of those experiences creates a plan that clients will trust more.

Proactive Honesty

A related trust-building trend that Rohit Bhargava has identified is what he calls “proactive honesty.”

Think about the last time you asked a server for a recommendation at a restaurant. Whom do you trust more? The server who tells you, “Everything here is great!” or the server who says, “I’d steer clear of the halibut tonight, but the filet is really good.”

Providing people with a bit of honest information they weren’t anticipating makes you seem more real to other people, and therefore more trustworthy. Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, is my recommended source for learning how to gain more trust and influence people.

As you work on being “more human” in your interpersonal relationships, try proactive honesty as a first step. “Pointing to something that is proactively honest because you had a bad experience or because you’re sharing something, it is a form of vulnerability,” Rohit says, “but it’s not like this deep thing that you would only really reveal to friends and close relatives.”

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