Why Brands Should Always Tell the Whole Truth

Your customers only know what they’ve seen.

My wife and I just bought a brand-new mattress from one of those D2C internet brands that are all the rage. We feel so hip. And I’ll be honest, I made the purchase without truly knowing anything about the mattress.

Like most buyers I did my research. I compared other brands, asked friends about their mattresses, even awkwardly asked to lay down on the bed of a friend or two. But I didn’t inspect the brand’s proprietary foam it or its firmness levels or claims to heat reduction. I made a purchase that was largely based on a gut feeling from what I had seen across their digital channels.

It wasn’t what I knew that made me purchase the mattress, but what I thought I knew.

A buyer in the consideration stage these days is going to take matters into his or her own hands. They want to pick and choose where they find information they trust, much like I did when researching my mattress choices. Once a buyer is convinced and they make their purchase, whatever it is they’ve learned is going to be put to the test.

If every customer will test what you tell them, why wouldn’t you want to tell the truth?

I’m putting what I learned about my mattress to the test night after night. The promises of heat reduction, the superiority of foam over coils, the comfort of their pressure-relieving design. If the mattress company told me the truth, then I will very likely return to them when our guest bed needs an upgrade.

If they didn’t tell me the truth, well… they’re lucky I’m a nice guy. The best-case scenario for when a customer proves you didn’t tell them the truth is the loss of a future purchase and customer. The worst-case scenario is developing a potentially insurmountable bad reputation if customers start spreading the real truth about you.

Real truth is powerful. Real truth is all that matters.

Sales and marketing loves to wrap the real truth up in a bunch of half truths and clever speak like a burrito overstuffed with all the fixins. But if the customer buys that burrito and finds something they don’t like at the center, they’re likely going believe they were lied to or “sold” to.

Show them the meat and the fixins and the ingredients and everything else. Tell the whole truth about your brand and products. Prove to them that your facts are accurate. The customers that purchase your products after seeing the truth will always be the ones that stick around and become advocates.

And having advocates that trust you is not something you should ever sleep on. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the easy pun.

Ready to wake up your brand’s messaging? Contact me and I’ll bring the caffeine.