Is honesty really the best policy?

Coming clean is always a good idea. Just not too clean…

When you’ve got a problem, what do you do? Brush it under the carpet, or fess up and fix it? In my software days, I always went for the latter course of action. Not that I’m innately more honest than the next person. It’s just that from experience, I know that one fib leads to another lie, and then another, and then to a great big whopper. And before you know it, you can’t remember what’s true and what’s not. So a bug was a bug, not an ‘undocumented feature’. Programs didn’t have ‘stability issues’ – they crashed. And something didn’t ‘slip through the cracks’. Instead, we simply made a mistake. “I’ve got an angry customer on the line,” the support people would say to me. “They’re demanding to speak to the product manager.” So I’d speak to the angry customer, who’d actually turn out to be a frustrated, ignored, spun-to customer. And in minutes, using the simple sword of truth (though a little more truthfully than Jonathan Aitken) I’d have them on-side. “I’m so sorry,” they’d say, their voice dropping an octave and becoming apologetic and conciliatory. “I know it’s not your fault.” (Actually, it is, I’d be thinking.) And however bad the truth was, just admitting it would prove enough to defuse the situation. Like I said, I’m not more honest than the next person. Just more practical.

Deep pans and thick skins

Honesty pays. Honestly, it does. Take Domino’s pizza. They realised that they had a big problem: lots of people didn’t like their pizzas. So instead of keeping it quiet, and working behind the scenes, they decided to go public and show people they were working on a solution. Their Pizza Turnaround site shows what they’re doing to make things better. Did we actually face our critics and reinvent our pizza from the crust up? it asks. Oh Yes We Did. What they’re doing here is really clever, for two reasons:

They’re admitting they’ve got a problem, and are being completely open about it.
They’re seen to be doing the right thing.

The second is really crucial. If you’re working on a problem, and nobody knows about it, nobody cares. If they do, they do. So make sure they know. But Domino’s pushes the honesty thing ever further: their Pulling the cheese video on Youtube lifts the lid on what really happens during a food photo-shoot (it’s not pretty). By the time the food stylists – aka the pizza make-up people – have finished, it’s not so much food as a work of art. And like many works of art, it’s entirely artificial. So by being honest about dishonesty, Domino’s comes out on top. Clever move.

More or less

The opposite of honest isn’t necessarily dishonest. It’s just less-than-honest. But it has an effect. Just look at product recalls. When supermarkets realise that their tomato purée has shards of glass in it, or that those curling tongs you just bought could set your hair on fire, what do they do? They put a bland, unbranded, anonymous display advert in the paper with the lot number, expiry date and minimal details of the problem. In a world saturated by branding, it goes virtually unnoticed. And the result? More people swallow glass and toast their tresses, thanks to the supermarkets’ attempt to minimise brand damage. Which ironically causes even more brand damage. How much more refreshing it would be to see a big, bold, branded advert that showed a photograph of the offending product and apologised up-front, with humility and candour. That approach would create a chain reaction: honesty would lead to understanding, which would lead to trust, which in turn would lead to continued loyalty. You might call it the Domino Effect.

Rocks in his head

There comes a time, though, when honesty is definitely not the best policy. When it crosses the line into naivety – or even stupidity. Take Gerald Ratner, eponymous founder of the UK high-street jewellers. He knew, we knew, everybody knew that Ratners sold cheap-as-chips rocks and rings. Their stuff all looked OK, and that was the main thing. People didn’t pay much, because they didn’t get much. But nobody said it – until he did. In a now-famous speech to the Institute of Directors in London in 1991, he blithely declared:

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap”.

But he didn’t stop there. Warming to his theme, he said that some of the earrings they sold were:

“cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.”

The result was immediate, damning and irreversible. £500m was wiped off the company’s stock-market value. Ratner was forced to resign as chairman, and two years later, the chain dumped the name and rebranded itself the Signet Group. Ratner earned the nickname The Sultan of Bling, in an echo of the song by the appropriately named Dire Straits. And the phrase ‘doing a Ratner’ entered the vocabulary of the business world to describe shooting oneself comprehensively in the foot. So is honesty really the best policy? Yes it is. But please, remember poor Gerald. And use it with caution. Find out more:

Easy over. Domino’s reinvents itself on pizzaturnaround.com, and blows the gaffe on photo-shoots with Pulling the Cheese on Youtube.
Diamond geezer. Gerald Ratner blows the (silver-plated) whistle on cut-price bling on Wikipedia.
And nothing but. Jonathan Aitken brandishes the simple sword of truth, and finds out just how sharp it is.

Kevin Branding, Communication, Marketing.