Why honesty is a superpower
James Bridgman
Brand & Marketing Leader for Scaling B2B | B2B Award Winner | #Fintech, #Proptech, #Edtech, #Climatetech, #AI and ambitious brands
I don't know about you, but I'm fed up with lazy thinking about marketing, particularly digital marketing.
"Marketing & sales will make up anything to get the sale / click / like" – this is the default view – in the industry too – worn into submission by the deluge of blogs and case studies on multi channel (or worse, 'omni channel') campaigns. Add to this the background algorithms to optimise content, retarget and customise messaging in real time (I'm not going to say 'AI' as this is rarely if ever, true), not to mention tracking of personal activities, and it is not surprising – and perhaps wise – that most people are a little cynical about what they see marketed. But there is a way through this for us sales, marketing and branding folks – radical honesty.
To explain why, I have to go back to my agency days of running Silverleaf, a boutique brand strategy agency. This was a time when meeting early stage entrepreneurs with fire in their eyes and butterflies in their bellies was a weekly, often daily, occurrence. We ended up helping over 150 of these rosy cheeked enthusiasts shape their brands, design their visual identities and craft their proposition. What was the difference between the ones that thrived and the ones that didn't?
Looking back - it's much easier that way - success was above all the result of passion for their business that kept them going through hard times and challenges. So much have many people pointed out. But I think it is actually more important that it kept them consistently, stubbornly honest about why they did what they did, or created the product they sold. Essentially, they knew and believed in the brand they were creating and stuck to it.
So why did this make their marketing and branding more effective? This 'radical honesty' about their purpose and mission, over time cut through to their target customers and built a foundation, a community and business which were in tune with one another. As Seth Godin, Kevin Kelly and others have put it, it is far better to have 1000 'true fans' than 1 million people to sort of like you. This gives you a much greater base for success. The ones that changed tack too often, focussed on sales not on relationships, and had to reinvent the wheel several times - at great financial and personal cost, are the ones that struggled more to succeed.
An easy test to see if you are struggling to build value through honesty? Ask yourself: have you invested over the previous 6-12 months in showing what you believe in and what your product/service can truly do?
Unfortunately it is not that easy to deliver this on a day to day basis. During my career I have had many encounters with founders and directors unknowingly building their business on quicksand as a result. Of course I have been as guilty as them on many occasions, not seeing the wood for the trees. None of this was due to a lack of experience, intelligence or business savvy – mostly it was a lack of perspective.
Three key issues
There are three big, connected 'perspective' problems that must be overcome before this is possible - particularly for those aspiring for fast growth and disruptive market impact:
- Long term vs short term priorities
- Culture vs data
- The founder's dilemma
These three issues need guts, conviction and a fair amount of leadership across the business to overcome, as they are not about the operation that you have built, but the decisions you have to make - and not make - every day. I'm assuming here that leading and building a business is also fundamentally about building a successful brand - which is critical to enable all parts of the business to perform at their best, particularly marketing.
Solving the long term vs short term problem
Many entrepreneurs and business leaders know the tension between building value and meeting goals. But growing brand you believe in, following its core values come what may is hard.
Daily pressure from colleagues, shareholders, the board, peer groups and even customers makes it easy to lose touch with the 'big picture' thinking you started out with that excited you, and only focus on the issues that swirl around your inbox on a daily basis. Even if you know your job is to build value in the brand and the company over time, the pressure to follow short term priorities is overwhelming.
A CEO I knew used to have quarterly strategy meetings with his top team and produce great ideas to implement over the following 3 months, and even got buy in from across the business to get it underway. Yet the week after he would still be giving out weekly, sometimes daily targets and goals to different managers across the business that made it impossible to even get started on the great ideas they had just agreed.
To get around this, a leader in a business must be honest and commit to three things:
- She must trust her team to be better than her at building the business - she must empower them to do what they do best, and they must demand she is honest about the progress they are making.
- He must get buy-in for building long term value in the core vision from all stakeholders - the board, shareholders and even staff and customers. It should not be a 'nice to have' and she should also commit to delivering that vision, and be accountable for it. If that's not possible, what does that say about this group of people trying to make the business thrive?
- Take time out regularly with someone outside the business – a mentor, coach, business group or trusted friends who can see change over time without the lens of the operational messiness that the leader sees every day.
Culture vs data
Many companies hear the sirens' call of big data, trends, data points and analytics, especially today when there is so much of it! If we can just nudge that KPI up 3% next quarter, get 1000 more returning visits to the web site this year, or get 100 more contacts in the database.
There is of course nothing wrong with any of these things, but often they are pursued in absence of any questioning about the big picture. Why do these indicators help us deliver on our vision? How does that motivate our people to connect with our customers and build value? What does this really tell us about how much the brand means to the communities we are part of? These questions are not trivial issues - they are why the organisation was set up in the first place, and why people want to work there and give their best!
Data is a powerful thing, but it does not create meaning – honest meaning about why we do what we do, why people buy our products or services, or love our brand. Jeremy Waite, an evangelist for the good use of data, podcaster and IBMer says "the power of data and AI should be to help good people do more good things".
In marketing data is very tempting - there are at least 7000 credible marketing tech solutions on the market in 2019, and many more niche solutions. But if we focus on the data too much, this will stop us focusing on the reason we are in the business - to connect the organisation to customers who care about the same things, which is a uniquely creative and intuitive process. Data is incredibly helpful and insightful, but is honestly not the way marketers add the most value to a brand.
The founder's dilemma
When should the founder step out of the way for the good of the business? And who is going to tell him or her? This sort of honesty is really tough, and sometimes the founders ARE the business and the brand and no one wants to get off the train (yet). But at least be honest about it if you want your organisation to grow beyond the founder's capabilities and capacity for change. It takes a different skillset to grow a business from zero to 20 employees, compared to growing it from 20 to 100, or 100 to 10,000. Different skills, different team dynamics and different leadership styles are required at each stage.
Equally, if a founder is a great asset to the business but has been smothered by the process, who can have that honest conversation to unlock that potential again? The ability of senior stakeholders in the business to have those conversations - in other words to allow radical honesty as part of the culture of the business, is a more powerful weapon for success than any amount of strategy can offer. Not only that, but being radically honest throughout your company is the best way to reduce risk of failure from the outset.
Just another word for integrity?
If you're a founder, a marketing director or a trusted advisor, if there is one thing I would like you to take away from this article it's this: radical honesty is a strategy that no-one can outflank, outcompete or out invest - it is truly a superpower. Not only that, if you have a business that can can help people, solve their problems or transform their experiences in a way that no others can, you have nothing to fear.
Beyond integrity, this is about action. Creating a brand, a vision and a culture that allows everyone in the business - even your customers - to believe in a way forward as a shared experience is always going to have a positive impact.
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If you have any comments or suggestions to add, I would love to hear them. This is just my summing up of my experience, there are undoubtedly other dimensions to honesty I haven't explored here, and maybe some pitfalls I haven't thought of.
Links to resources:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/