Link between happiness and investment

I read an HBR research that discovered an interesting link between the happiness and long term investment tendency of a firm. While it sounds intuitive (as most of the research results) I would be interested in it's application - should a city (company) invest more to become happier or should it first work on being happy to attract more investment. 

"Companies located in places with happier people invest more, according to a recent paper by Tuugi Chuluun of Loyola University Maryland and Carol Graham of Brookings. In particular, firms in happy places spend more on R&D. That’s because happiness, they argue, is linked to the kind of longer term thinking necessary for making investments for the future."

https://hbr.org/2015/06/companies-in-happy-cities-invest-more-for-the-long-term

Summary HBR Article: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places

Old MetaphorMarketers have long used the famous funnel metaphor to think about touch points: Consumers would start at the wide end of the funnel with many brands in mind and narrow them down to a final choice. Companies have traditionally used paid-media push marketing at a few well-defined points along the funnel to build awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately inspire purchase. But the metaphor fails to capture the shifting nature of consumer engagement.

Shifting Nature of consumer
Today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond. (CEB and EAB)

Consider: Old spending - highest amount in this stage. Digital Age - Don't spend too much at this stage

New Concept
First, instead of focusing on how to allocate spending across media—television, radio, online, and so forth—marketers should target stages in the decision journey.

Wrong Spending: 70% to 90% of spend goes to advertising and retail promotions that hit consumers at the consider and buy stages.

Digital Age Correct Spending: Consumers are often influenced more during the evaluate and enjoy-advocate-bond stages. In many categories the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s advocacy.

Action Steps
Understand CDJ and reorganize roles

The shift to a CDJ (Customer Decision Journey)-driven strategy has three parts: understanding your consumers’ decision journey; determining which touch points are priorities and how to leverage them; and allocating resources accordingly—an undertaking that may require redefining organizational relationships and roles.

New Roles for Marketing
Orchestrator
Many consumer touch points are owned-media channels, such as the company’s website, product packaging, and customer service and sales functions. Usually they are run by parts of the organization other than marketing. Re-organize.

Publisher and “content supply chain” managerCompanies where the marketing function takes on the role of publisher in chief—rationalizing the creation and flow of product related content—consumers develop a clearer sense of the brand and are better able to articulate the attributes of specific products. If not marketing then re-organize.

Marketplace intelligence leaderIn many companies IT controls the collection and management of data and the relevant budgets; and with its traditional focus on driving operational efficiency. Marketing data should be under marketing’s control.

Prepare A Customer Experience PlanA deep investigation of decision journey often reveals the need for a plan that will make the customer’s experience coherent.


https://hbr.org/2010/12/branding-in-the-digital-age-youre-spending-your-money-in-all-the-wrong-places/ar/1