MarketSense

How Stretching the Truth and White Lies Hurt Your Integrity

What is your professional reputation worth?

My last post talked about how stretching the truth and white lies hurt your product and hurt your business.   For a marketer that should be a big deal.   In stretching the truth we also hurt ourselves.   And that should be a much bigger deal.   At the end of the day, the reputation we develop within a corporate environment is our personal, professional reputation.   As an employee, we lend our personal reputations to the business not the other way around.   

In my first product marketing job, the sales team often pulled me into sales opportunities.    Having a technical background, I understood our product well.   I was also well versed in the competition.   Every sales situation was a competitive situation.  As with any potential sale, there were situations where our product was a good fit and others where we would probably never meet the prospect’s expectations.   My role in these sales situations was to fit our product to the prospect’s situation – a consultative role.   The agreement I had with the sales team was that if I couldn’t find a fit between the prospect’s needs and the product, I would say so.    If I was put on the spot by the prospect, I would give my opinion even if in that situation it didn’t favor the sale our product.

I was surprised by the effects of the above business ethic.   Within the prospects and customers I visited, my personal reputation for integrity developed.   These prospects and customers remembered my honesty and because of it valued my opinion in other related areas.   They extended my personal reputation to also apply to my company.   Even when we didn’t get the immediate business by selling my product, we were invited into other sales opportunities which we otherwise may never have been offered.

After 3 years marketing my product at that first company, I took a product marketing position at another company.   Guess what.   Some of the prospects and customers of my new company were the same prospects and customers I had visited at my old company.    I was participating in sales calls in my new company that engaged the very same people I had met with in my old company.   Of course, those individuals remembered me.   They also recalled my integrity from our dealings in the old company.   My new company benefited from my reputation. 

A bad set of business decisions changed my situation.  Promises management authorized me and others to make to customers were not carried through.   Management asked us to deliver the bad news to the customers.   I knew that my reputation was at risk.   After seeing how important reputation is in our business, I was not willing to take that “hit” for the company.   The senior manager (the one who made both decisions) was the one who explained the painful situation to the customers. 

I have experienced the benefits of leading a life of personal and professional integrity.    If you measure success by sales, then integrity may cost you some immediate, short term sales.   But that loss came with something much more valuable – a long term position as trusted advisor and the opportunity for more lucrative future sales.   

The business world is a small place.   You never know when and where you will run into someone you know from a previous job.  You can’t count on the business to protect your reputation.   The business will do what it thinks is in its best interest.   Only you can act with integrity and protect your reputation. 

How Stretching the Truth and White Lies Hurt Your Product and Your Business

The edict came down from on high.   New rules were in place for the presentation of benchmarks and the validation of marketing claims.    Marketing had to clean up its act or the company risked fines and other legal consequences.    Those rules, instituted many years ago by my employer, were eye-opening for me.    I was a young marketer and I welcomed the idea that ethics were a code that all marketers lived by.

Through the years I learned that marketing ethics like any other ethics ultimately rely on the individual.   Corporate management plays a part in our ethics to the extent that they clearly define our ethical boundaries and then hold us accountable to those rules.    In practice, I have rarely seen consequences for bad practice along the way.  However, the consequences are there and they are real, we may just not recognize them.

Marketing is always on the spot to present our products in the "best light".   Sometimes, we haven’t done our homework and find the “best light” elusive.  Other times, we aren’t given much to work with by engineering.   The temptation is to stretch the truth, to tell little white lies about our products’ capabilities.   We try to make our products look bigger and better than they are.   And after we are done with the product messaging, yet another layer of truth-stretching is added by sales.   The result is that our product is melded into the “ideal solution” for any prospective customer who comes along.   

Management is patting us on the back for a job well done.  After all, getting lots of new customers is good, isn’t it?   Not always.   When your product isn’t a good fit for a customer, it creates a lot of undue hardship across both the company’s and the customer’s organizations.  I’ve seen engineering and support work overtime trying to make a force fit work.  I’ve seen bad fit customers become the two ton gorilla on the company’s back.   The result is angst, lots of angst.  Even worse, there is the loss of a whole lot of productive time which could have been used implementing valuable new features and obtaining good fit customers.   

Perhaps the most gullible converts to truth-stretched marketing is the company itself.   We all would like to think that the baby (product) doesn’t have warts.    In my experience, the baby’s producers are particularly blind to the baby’s warts.   Add marketing and the baby has now been cosmetically altered so that the warts are no longer visible.   It is not popular for marketing to speak the truth about their products internally.  Most management doesn’t want to hear the truth.   They say that marketing is complaining.   They say that marketing isn‘t a team player.  They say that marketers aren’t smart enough to market the product.    As a marketer, you feel that your job is on the line when you tell the truth about the product.  Unfortunately, everyone loses when management takes this attitude.  With this organizational blindness, the opportunities for real product improvement are never realized.    The organization lives under the pressure of an inferior product.

Bad marketing ethics eventually catch up with you.   They hurt your product by diverting valuable resources to force fit solutions.   They hurt the company by disguising the real problems with the company’s offerings.  In my next blog entry, I’ll talk about how bad marketing ethics hurt you, the marketer.  It is a jungle out there.  Be courageous and do the right thing.