Have you ever talked to a 5-year old when they are trying to hide something? They will answer your direct question but not the implied question. They usually won’t out-right lie, but they will evade the truth. So, you get caught in a game of 20 questions to get to the truth. Sound like any marketing campaigns you’ve seen lately or may have even been responsible?
Marketing campaigns live and die (succeed and fail) by how effective they are at garnering attention, uncovering requirements, establishing compelling events and providing value exchange opportunities in order to generate leads or further sales opportunities. However, in today’s over-communicated, over-crowded market, the tendency to “bend” the truth is a strong temptation every marketing executive faces, especially when strong-willed CEO’s or founders with intractable opinions of what they think they have built.
You would think that with age we would forgo this trait of selective truth telling, but the unfortunate observation is that is not the case. All too often we suffer from selective amnesia. When asked why, most will say that people aren’t ready for the unfiltered truth: “You can’t handle the truth!” Even Hollywood movies like Liar Liar with Jim Carey show (to ludicrous extreme) what unfiltered truth could do to a person.
Truth usually has three perspectives: the one of the person talking, the one of the person listening and the actual one of the impartial person observing. Without truth, there can be no trust and without trust there can be no long-term repeatable marketing success. Truth is the glue that holds prospects to successful marketing campaigns.
It is important to market your truth and avoid the tendency to embellish at all costs. In today’s socially driven, Google-centric product evaluations you will find that there is no place to hide.
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