Back in 2019, my wife’s company made an unpopular decision: they eliminated vendors outings.
As the lead media planner for several large clients, who represent have advertising budgets in the millions of dollars, my wife is a prime target for advertising industry vendors, who sell everything from traditional ad space to pools of credit card spending data. During the typical work week, a salesperson would ask if she would be interested in a sushi lunch, happy hour, Rockies tickets, Red Rocks tickets, and even, on one occasion, a trip to Mexico. Of course, my wife accepted many of these vendor outings—hard to turn down a free lunch at one of Denver’s best sushi places!
Recognizing that many of their clients were funded by taxpayer dollars, and the likely negative public perception of government money indirectly funding getaway “business vacations,” my wife’s company saw the potential for future backlash and banned vendor outings going forward.
But beyond the potential for bad PR, there’s another good reason to avoid vendor outings: the powerful effect of reciprocity. I’ll grab directly from (the tremendous) Wikipedia page on this social psychology concept of reciprocity for this one:
Reciprocity is not only a strong determining factor of human behavior; it is a powerful method for gaining one’s compliance with a request. The rule of reciprocity has the power to trigger feelings of indebtedness even when faced with an uninvited favor and irrespective of liking the person who executed the favor. In 1971, Dennis Regan tested the strength of these two aspects of reciprocity in a study where participants believed they were in an art appreciation experiment with a partner, Joe, who was really Regan’s assistant. During the experiment, Joe would disappear and bring back a soft drink for the participant. After this phase of the experiment was over, Joe would ask the participant to buy raffle tickets from him. The more the participants liked Joe, the more likely they were to buy raffle tickets from him. However, when Joe had given them a soda and thus indebted them to reciprocate, it made no difference whether the participants liked Joe or not, the rule of reciprocity overpowered liking. Thus, individuals who we might not even like have the power to greatly increase our chances of doing them a favor simply by providing us with a small gift or favor prior to their request. Furthermore, we are obliged to receive these gifts and favors which reduces our ability to choose to whom we wish to be indebted.
As with many of these cognitive biases and “compliance” strategies, most of us already know about reciprocity. The catch is that we just don’t think it applies to us. We know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We know the point of these outings from a salesperson’s perspective is to incur reciprocity—I buy you lunch, you give me your (more valuable!) business—but we accept the “free” lunch anyway, confident that we can out out-think biases that are hard-wired into our brains.
Those of us who have been on such outings also know about the awkward pivot towards “shop talk” or “business” that happens towards the end. Once the rule of reciprocity has been well established—So, you’ve sat through two expensive beers and seven innings of a baseball game—that’s when the outing no longer seems so “free.”
Despite recognizing what is happening, I fall hard for requests after this pivot. I’m helpless to the rule of reciprocity—I will feel a rising guilt come over me, a pressing need to find a way to reciprocate and erase the debt that I’ve incurred.
One solution is obvious: stop accepting these invitations. Another solution—more tricky to navigate, but removing some of the issues of reciprocity: insist on paying your own way for these outings, ideally on your company’s dime.
After all, there are plenty of benefits to these outings, including industry networking, team bonding (assuming that multiple members of your organization have been invited), and, well, learning about new products and services. There are also hazier benefits to consider: spending a lovely, buzzed evening on the top deck at Coors Field or relaxing with a massage appointment after a tough week of work.
Regardless, if you want to avoid the rule of reciprocity in these “sales” situations, you have to do something other than just accepting the offer. You’ll end up owing them, even if you don’t think you will.
Taylor Coe 