Video inspections live or fall on trust, which viewers judge from lighting, backgrounds, and how confident an inspector looks on camera. The 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate proved that appearance shapes credibility more than substance. Poor video production kills sales, even when customers can't say why.
And a great example of this in American history is when Nixon was running against Kennedy, and TV was new, and Nixon went on TV looking like himself, and Kennedy had makeup. He practiced. Like, they, they, uh, thought about lighting, they thought about angles. They, like, in what came out of those debates, which revolutionized politics at the time, And Kennedy, Kennedy, you know, completely got elected. And the idea before that was, oh, you're a, you're a guy, you show up and you're on TV as you know who you are, because previous to that it was the radio and nobody saw what you look like in your mannerisms, that sort of thing. Right. And so in our business, there's a new evolution where the trust now is on how you look. So if you look like you've never done this before, Why would I want to have you do my breaks if you look like you don't know what you're doing and you're not likable and you have no charisma? Why would I want you to do my breaks? I don't, I don't like you and I don't trust you in that sense. And so we're missing the psychology in a lot of ways of that. What we're selling at the end of the day is trust. Like, do you trust me? And video is one of the easiest ways to lose trust because people are very judgmental. And so if you have a messy stall, if you have bad angles, if you aren't confident when you're talking, if it seems like you're making it up as you go along, who wants to pay you to do a safety item on their vehicle that is making it up when they go along? And a lot of these, uh, decisions are made unconsciously. Like it isn't necessarily that the people are consciously saying, hey, I don't trust this guy. Or this gal, they're just not trusting you and then going, well, if I can wait, I'm going to wait. Right. And so we're missing the thing that we don't understand, that we're selling trust more than anything else.
