Let’s stop trying to sell corporate brands like chocolate bars

As a child, regular adverts appeared on TV advertising Milky Bar as ‘the sweet you could eat between meals without filling you up’. The implication was that mothers could be sure that their children would still eat their main meal.

Was it true? Doubtful. Did it matter? Not particularly. When it comes to buying chocolate bars, a bit of hype or spin does no harm as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

Sadly businesses and governments have tried to use the same techniques to buy the trust of their audiences. When you read a piece of corporate jargon, it’s a sure fire sign that an organisation is not telling the whole truth.

Think about how many times we hear someone in the media being quizzed about something that has earlier been stated, only to see them squirm and twist in order to make the story hold together. Mark Twain once stated ‘If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.’

Thankfully audiences are more intelligent than they are given credit for and in the internet they now have a very powerful tool with which to check the facts. When they hear hype or spin, they react at best with ambivalence; at worst by disbelieving what they are told. Either way, trust is eroded and replaced with cynicism. The only people believing the spin may well be your organisation.

For a number of years SAS handled Ericsson’s corporate reporting. It happened to be during one of the worst periods in the company’s corporate history when they reported Sweden’s largest corporate losses, post the dot-com bubble bursting. We took a very open stance to reporting and were able to demonstrate that the market was bad, and that service providers had stopped spending, but that Ericsson was still the market leader. Afterwards an institutional investor said, ‘Because you told the truth during the bad times, I believe we can trust you in good times.’

My advice is this. The next time you reach for the book of corporate clichés, don’t. Remember you are talking to human beings and, instead, search for the essential truth of the story and communicate it straightforwardly. It’s usually more interesting and, in my experience, the truth is usually more interesting and credible.

Truth = trust.

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