Fastest, Cheapest, Brilliantest - or perhaps a little honesty might be better?

Being a bit of an obsessive marketing geek, I spend a lot of time looking at the way companies present themselves to the market and promote their products and services.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few years is the rise and rise of the super superlative in every field of marketing serving every marketplace. You know the kind I mean if you think about it:

•   Eat one of these pills and lose half your body weight.
•   Our Internet service is so fast it delivers content before you even knew you wanted it.
•   Our service is so wonderful a Celebrity endorsed it

You would honestly have to live in a cave with no access to any form of media not to have noticed this. But the big question is why do companies feel the need to promise things they can’t realistically deliver on.

Not sure what I mean, well think about these few examples:

• Mobile telecoms companies in the UK are absolutely adamant that they cover 99% of the population, yet spend five minutes looking at the comments about coverage on social media and you would think the reality is exactly the opposite?
• Utilities claiming that their deals will save you money if you just sign up to one of their 'simple' tariffs that trap consumers into complex and often very expansive contracts – not sure if I am right about that, well why is OFGEN spending so much time investigating it.
•  Lets not even go near the financial services sector with PPI, mortgage miss selling and many, many other examples of big promise, no delivery. 

A very brief and not terribly exact piece of research I carried out with about 30 random contacts showed that around two thirds of those I spoke to pretty much know that the increasingly outlandish promises being made by big businesses don’t amount to a hill of beans (whatever that means) but they still buy from these big players.

So here is a question for you. Does this world of super superlative but mostly empty corporate marketing promises present an opportunity for the rest of us?

Remember Roy Brooks the Honest Estate Agent from the 1960s who made it big by being almost ruthlessly honest about properties he was selling?  What about AG Barr the Scottish soft drinks manufacturer that never uses anything other than humour to market its drinks?

In both cases taking a different approach has paid dividends time and time again, while everyone else is still playing the same old game.

In neither case do they make outlandish claims (except humorously) or over promise on something they can’t deliver. As a result we trust them.

Anyone that has read the book or done any work with me knows that in a connected market feedback – good or bad – is often instantaneous and entirely public through social media, not to mention costly for some companies reputations. So isn’t it maybe a better idea to just set expectations properly and then deliver on them, rather than trying to promise the earth and then deliver a small egg cup of sand?

I’ll leave it to you to work that one out for yourself in the context of your own business but it would be great to hear other’s views on this.

Author – Tim Sandford