True Lies
Some of you will react very strongly to this topic, many negatively, but here is the simple truth: people lie! Dr. Sissela Bok, at Harvard University, estimates that “the average American lies 200 times a day”. When I have spoken on this topic at conferences or in boardrooms, I tend to get a lot of disbelief and push-back. After all, one of the best compliments that we can pay to each other is calling someone “honest.” One of the first things that one must learn in order to transform from a customer focused organization into a customer-centric marketer is the power of understanding and learning from the lies we (and our customers) tell. Too often in the marketing world we treat lies as a negative thing, or at best, obstacles to truth. They are really fantastic opportunities for insight.
Research into lies has told us two important facts: the lies we tell are often told as much to ourselves as they are to our listener; and lying takes more cognitive effort than telling the truth, even when we don’t “intentionally” lie. There must be a reason for our brains to expend that effort!
First, lets understand that there are different types of lies:
Error—a lie by mistake. The person believes they are being truthful, but what they are saying is not true.
Omission – leaving out relevant information. Easier and least risky. It doesn’t involve inventing any stories. It is passive deception and less guilt is involved.
Denial—refusing to acknowledge a truth. The extent of denial can be quite large—they may be lying only to you just this one time or they may be lying to themselves.
Minimization—reducing the effects of a mistake, a fault, or a judgment call.
Exaggeration—representing as greater, better, more experienced, more successful.
Fabrication—deliberately inventing a false story.
This matters to us as marketers. There are two important ramifications - one obvious and one much less so.
First we have to recognize the lie, we do this by a combination of listening with all of our senses, and by verifying facts through other means. It’s one of the reasons that we do as much research in person as possible - it’s much easier to tell digital lies without detection!
“when someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”
The second and more important reason is to understand the reason for the lie. Market researchers tend to treat lies as “noise” in the research. Anthropologists and ethnographers treat lies as a valuable indication that there is deeper meaning present. Lies indicate that the teller is sending a specific message both to you and to him or herself about something that is terrifically important to them – hence the investment of cognitive energy. As Daniel Kahnemann, author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” says, “when someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”
