Get on trend and Lie
This provocation piece was published in TheDrum, 23rd November 2016.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 15 years talking with brands about the rising need for transparency — a tech and consumer-driven shift that seemed unarguable and a good thing too.
But what if this belief was just self-reinforcing, echo chamber talk inside the liberal-elite bubble?
It seems like the real trend might be for lying, falsehood and fakery.
President-elect Trump is king of the political liars, with a 91% falsehood score from Politifact. A Google search for ‘Trump liar’ has more than 15 million results and easily outscores ‘Crooked Hilary’ as a search term on Google Trends.
Meanwhile, there is a firestorm of Fake News, which Facebook and Google say they will be cracking down on, but observers (e.g. the Guardian) are sceptical about both their intent and the practicality of doing this.
Hoax news stories this week that have crashed around the internet like a drunken mythomaniac at a party include Trump’s death from a heart attack and a particularly audacious story from Neo News in Pakistan about Trump having been born Dawood Ibrahim Khan in Pakistan before being adopted and brought to the USA.
So it can only be a matter of time before a king-liar consumer brand emerges, and succeeds! Let’s call it The Bigly Corporation (pr. BigLie).
Brands need to be distinct, just as politicians are. It’s the Zig while others Zag principle.
So, if all around you are transparent, ethical brands with social purpose, what’s to be done?
Lie big and win. Make your lies better, more ridiculous, but provocative and memorable (“I will build a great, great wall…”).
My prediction is that we will soon have a new mega-brand (perhaps in retail, or travel) that is based on falsehood and verifiably untrue statements. There will be outrage. Consumer-rights activists will be up in arms. But enough consumers won’t care. They didn’t trust the so-called ‘truthful’ corporations anyway, so The Bigly Corporation will seem like a refreshing change and perversely, more believable than the ‘trust me’ messages of the mainstream.
Sound ridiculous?
It worked for Ryan Air over more than a decade of abuse of customers. Of course, the Zag that Ryan Air were Zigging against wasn’t truth as such, but the idea of customer service being paid lip-service while standards of delivery were lamentably low. Arguably, Ryan Air were — for a for a while — the only airline that wasn’t a liar. It’s certainly true though that they dared to break one of the unspoken rules of service industries by saying they didn’t care about their customers. Shocking stuff from an airline. And talking of lies, Michael O’Leary did once say that “All flights are fuelled with Leprechaun wee and my bullshit!”.
Get ready for The Bigly Corporation. It’s going to be huge, the numbers will be fantastic.
