Presentation Joe Gladstone – How Money Can Buy You Happiness?

Our current research topic is called “Digital Happiness” and we’re exploring new ideas about how companies should interact with their clients and employees. This time we want to share the idea and vision from Joe Gladstone: ‘How Money Can Buy You Happiness’. Gladstone presented his vision to us and our clients during our event In Pursuit of Digital Happiness in Brussels on November 9-10. Joe Gladstone is straight with us: ‘Privacy is dead’. Surprisingly, Gladstone doesn’t see this as a bad thing. If people are matched with their environment and the people around them they seem to be happier. The same principles goes for the things they buy: the more a product matches someones personality, the more happiness it brings. It’s up to the company to be the perfect matchmaker; look at the deeper values, happiness, and motivations of the customer. Gladstone picked the cherries from his research to help us understand how we can help people to improve their financial decisions. It turns out digital actually can bring happiness, if only done right! About Joe Gladstone Dr. Joe Gladstone is an Assistant Professor at University College London. Named one of the top 30 people under 30 in Finance by Forbes Magazine, Joe’s research draws from both Behavioural Economics and Consumer Psychology to understand how we can help people to improve their financial decisions. To achieve this, Joe’s research involves active collaborations with companies and government departments, using large-scale transaction datasets and experiments. Joe is a regular guest on BBC World News, where he comments on topics related to consumer behaviour. Joe’s research has been profiled in many of the worlds leading news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Economist, and Fox News. About the In Pursuit of Digital Happiness events Two recent deep dives with a group of  IT Executives gave us more insights in how our current research topic “Digital Happiness” is going to evolve. We’ll share the videos recorded at these meetings that we’ve organized in the coming months. Both in the US (Chicago) and Europe (Brussels) business executives, media experts and academia shared their views on the massive transformative impact of digital technologies. The fundamentals on which the program In Pursuit of Digital Happiness was based are simple: the technological and financial limitations of digital progress have been dealt with. The real question to answer for businesses to be successful in the society that emerges is, “What do we desire?” Happiness, in the broad definition by the school of positive psychology – from fun and the daily pleasure to getting in a state of flow, and the rewarding feeling of living a meaningful life and doing meaningful things – guided the discussions about the social desirability.