David Emery OnlinePesky White Lies
16 August 2006
Lies in marketing don’t work anymore (unless your customers are stupid).
Stupid enough to not realise that you think they’re stupid, at least.
With this rather important fact in mind, if you want to use lies in your marketing, you’d better hunt out a stupid audience first. Not an internet user, that’s for sure; even if your lie isn’t a big-whopper, but more one of those pesky-white-lie types someone somewhere will pick up on it. Of course, if one person picks up on it, and makes it sound like a big deal…
Boom. It is.
The audience for lie tellers is getting rapidly smaller.
Even stretching the truth a little is getting pretty difficult.
What’s maybe more important though, is that people are savvy enough to realise when they are being lied to, but also when they are not; “the most effective xyz in the world”; “Proven to be more effective then abc”; “More reliable then foo” – they just don’t cut it any more.
“We like our product”; “We think it’s better because of x”; “This is our story, we hope you like us” – it’s the only way to effectively target an audience that’s been marketed to for a hundred years.