Soundbites: Why your company maybe guilty of lying, and how to fix it.

One of the biggest problems is that we assume that people hear things in the same way that we are communicating them. And so what ends up happening is a fundamental miscommunication because people don't actually understand that what they're saying is not necessarily being understood by the person who's listening to them. The important thing is to think of your brand as a reflection of who you are and who you want to appear to be. And that really comes down to defining how you want to talk to people. The thing is, we live in a completely different world now where it is possible to listen to our customers at scale. Marketers can't afford to lie because they actually just need to understand what their audience wants. We actually start with the fundamental problem that we're solving for people. A lot of product marketers who I know at the moment use Facebook to test hypotheses. It's even possible to use the little polls on LinkedIn to test hypotheses as well. Social media fundamentally changed the nature of marketing communication so that it was no longer possible or no longer advisable for organizations just to have one way communications. One of the most important lessons I think I can share with anyone who's trying to communicate effectively with their audience is rather try something, anything. If you get it wrong the first time, that's great because you can learn from it. That's what verbalistic stands for, genuinely meaningful communication.