INBOUND 2015 I&E: Doug Kessler "Insane Honesty in Content Marketing"

Thank you very much. Thanks for hanging out till the end here. This is, this one. You're going to be glad you stayed because this is an underused tactic that it's my favorite subject these days. I love talking about this because it's something that has a huge business case for doing it and almost nobody does it. And when they do, it works. So check this out. Start with the story at Velocity. We do every year at Christmas, we take everybody and partners out to a Christmas, a different city in Europe to do. We're London based to do a Christmas weekend. And this time it was my turn to do the restaurant. Never a good idea. I suck at that. But there it is. I did my TripAdvisor thing and I sent out an email to 15 different restaurants. And I was saying, look, we're about 40 people. We want a separate room so we don't bother anybody else. Basically, we have a few vegetarians, we want to do some drinks beforehand, that kind of thing. Out of the 15, 10 just ignored me. What's up with that? I don't know. Five sent back, okay, here's our restaurant here, so we can help you. And one really stood out. One was this weird response, which is why her restaurant was probably not right for us. And we had a correspondence going on and with each one she kept telling me why I shouldn't pick her restaurant. She couldn't give us a separate room. She could maybe give us these screens so that it felt separate, but she couldn't promise a separate room. It wasn't a vegetarian restaurant. She said, we can do some vegetarian dishes, but it's a fish restaurant. If you don't like that, we're probably not for you and stuff like that. Or we can do drinks, but we can't do them in a separate area. And it was this ongoing conversation, ongoing correspondence, where she's trying to talk me out of picking her restaurant, which is very odd. And I realized what she was doing was this total proactive honesty. What she was doing was volunteering the weaknesses of her offer, even though I hadn't asked. You know, she was volunteering her worst points. And that's what I call insane honesty. Insane honesty is putting your worst foot forward, essentially. And what she did in that. And I realized, you know, I was really attracted to picking this restaurant because of these two hugely important signals. First, she cared about us having a great time, and she cared about that more than her own short term profits. And when you think about it, I mean, we're in London, she's in Rome, it's not like if we were disappointed, we were likely to go back or not anyway. So she could have just taken the money and run, but she didn't want to do that. She wanted to make sure we were not disappointed. And the second thing she signaled was that we. That we could trust everything she said about the positives of her offer. So when she said, we have a great wine list, I knew it was true, because she fucking would have told me if it was a shitty wine list. She said everything else they didn't have. And when I thought about those signals, I thought, those are hugely important things to signal to a prospect. And wouldn't we, as marketers and content marketers, want to be sending that signal to every one of our prospects? So can we use this same technique? We went to the restaurant, it was called Eleonora Darboria, and it was fantastic. Absolutely great. Everything she said was true. It wasn't a separate room, but it didn't matter. And the food was great. And we all put good TripAdvisor reviews up there. This is insane honesty, and it is different than just normal honesty. Normal honesty is just ethical, professional. I hope we're all that anyway. You know we're not liars, right? This is different. This is the insane kind. Insane honesty is a choice. It's a tactic that you can use. It's a strategy. And what it is, it says, actively seek out your weaknesses and share them openly, maybe even lead with them. Actively seek out the weakest part of your offer and push it right out to the front. I mean, as marketers, I mean, you're probably sitting there thinking, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, sounds great. No fucking way I'm gonna do this. And that's the normal response for any trained marketer, for sure. Or anyone who's been in marketing for a while. And frankly, for most people who consume marketing for most of their lives, as we all do, and I want to talk you out of that. I want to say if we look at it carefully, it's actually quite a sane thing. Insane honesty is putting your worst foot forward. And marketing's all about putting your best foot forward. Right? I wasn't here. I flew in from Content Marketing World last night, so I didn't see anything here yet, but everyone's talking about Brene. I love saying the word Brene. And apparently she talked about vulnerability. And this is partly about that, too. This is partly about opening up and sharing vulnerability. So why is it such a good idea? I'm going to share six reasons by the end of This, I think any one of them is enough to convince you to give this a go. Two or three of them and it's like a really strong argument. And all six is a no brainer. And there's some examples in here from classic campaigns and also some more recent stuff. First reason this is a big one, insane honesty. Surprises. That's actually two reasons, isn't it? Surprises and charms surprises. Because marketing doesn't talk like this. And when you think what does surprise do for you? It gets you attention. And all marketers want attention. We know it's good. You look at the goal section of any strategy, you're going to see, you know, win attention and generate leads and all this. But attention is different than the other goals, isn't it? Because if you don't get attention, you don't get to do any of the other goals, you don't get to further any of your other goals until you get attention. It's the number one goal of every marketer. It's the one that should be number one in every plan. So anything that helps you get attention's gotta be on your list of things to consider, right? And surprise is something that gets attention. It's like, well, I didn't expect this person to be talking to me or this brand to be talking to me in this way. And it also charms. It's a likable thing to do. You know, we all like people who are a bit more self effacing, aren't braggarts, you know, but most brands actually are bragging. They brag. You know, that's what marketing does, right? But we like people who don't brag and we like brands that don't brag too. So insane honesty is a surprising and a charming thing to do. It's a nice, nice signal to send example from history. Very, very classic. So I don't know if this was 65 or something. Hertz was huge. Number one. Its market share was double. Avis's. Avis was tiny. Marketing 101 says ignore that. Just act like a leader and one day maybe it'll come true. Like the Disney princesses, you know, just pretend it isn't. So the last thing you do is actually tell everybody about it. Tell everyone you're not the leader, you're the number two brand. That's what they did. Classically, when you're number two, you try harder. Or else was the first A.D. doyle Dane Byrne back in the 70s 60s. Avis can't afford not to be nice or not to give you a new Car like a lively Super Torque Ford or not Noah Pastrami or MRI place in Duluth. You know, when you're number two, you have to try harder. Brilliant line, brilliant idea. And bragging about being far behind their biggest competitor, the gorilla in the market. Totally counterintuitive, totally successful. Great campaign for them. So much so that we try harder is still a line they use. And this is 50 years later or something. I mean, how many lines do you guys know that have survived 50 years? I mean, that's unheard of. So you could say the brand was built on this and that. To me, it was at the time hugely surprising and very, very charming that somebody could come out and not be beating their chest and saying how great they were, but actually saying, no, we're not. We're number two and we're trying harder. Another example I really like is, do you know the little weaselly lines in native advertising where they try, they tell you why? This isn't really their content. This is the content of some brand, our partner content, or all this weird stuff. TheOnion.com says there's a stone where our soul once was. Enjoy this sponsored content. I really love that. I mean, it's just charming, right? It's likable. You know, someone who's making fun of themselves there. Okay, that was surprise and charm. Second, it signals confidence. Again, this one, if you take this one alone, it's worth doing this tactic. Confidence, to me is the single most important thing in really good marketing. Not overconfidence, not arrogance, just solid, real confidence. And we did an ebook about this or a slideshare called the Other C Word. What makes Great content? Marketing great. What we did is take all our favorite campaigns and put them on a table and just said, what makes great content great? And it was Follow the Frog, the Rainforest alliance video, which we love. And it was Dumb Ways to Die. And it was the epic split. And it was all this fantastic marketing. And we just think there's got to be something that it has in common. And there was very, very little that it had in common. There was funny stuff, there was sad stuff, there was moving stuff, there was data driven stuff. But all of it. The only thing all this great marketing had in common and this great content was confidence. It was the signal that said, we know what we're doing, we're good at what we do. And not only that, we're good at telling our story. We're good at, we're gonna take you where we want you to go. You're in good hands with us when we tell you this story. And that is a wonderful thing that insane honesty can do. It's signals that deep confidence in oneself. Super classic, Great, great example here, a favorite campaign. So how do you market a car that looks like the one on the right when all cars look like the ones on the left? I mean that's a tough brief back then. I mean that's a tough brief at any time. And of course what they did, another absolute classic ugly is only skin deep. Or they have another one called Lemon. They didn't just take a feature, a weak feature and push it to the front. They took the most important determinant of car purchase and you know how a car looks. Aesthetics isn't a small thing. It's pretty much the whole thing for most buyers. They had a funny looking thing. Marketing 101 was to ignore that talk all about fuel efficiency. The thing was way more fuel efficient than any other car. You know, they had a lot of. It was way cheaper. These are two huge benefits. And somewhere again, Doyle Dane Birnback somewhere in the agency they said let's take these big really differentiating benefits, put them aside and take this weird weakness, take this elephant in the room and make it the hero of our campaign. And I mean I knew a few of these, I knew the Lemon one, I knew this one. But Google VW classic DDB ads and you'll see there's about 50 brilliant, brilliant ads. It was a long running thing. One of my favorites is it's ugly but it gets you there. You know, one of the earliest examples of news jacking, again, confidence. I mean that only a confident brand could make fun of itself in that way. You know, only a leader, only someone who knew they were onto something good. And one thing I like about is that the VW brand, even today a lot of that same attitude and energy and confidence still accrues to the brand today. You think about vw, it's got this charm, it's got this wit, it's got a smile to it and it's all attached to its confidence. Again, you know, epically, hugely successful marketing based on putting a really bad thing right in the headline. Okay, I've done confidence. Third one, it builds trust. This one. It's weird because, you know, nobody trusts marketing really. And it's our biggest, toughest job is to earn trust. It's to get people to lower down the marketing defense barriers that we all put up. And just listen and just think, okay, what they say is true. I mean if you could get that done for yourself and then the rest of your marketing would be believed because you were trusted. Wouldn't you do just about anything to establish that, to win trust and to earn trust. And like with the restaurant lady, you know, I really, really did trust every single good thing she said. I thought that's got to be true because she's already shown me that she has put my needs and goals ahead of her own. I trust this woman. A great example here is an ad. It got attention. It was so honest. And this is a headline in a London paper. Brutally honest advert describes East London flat as not very nice but attracts a lot of interest. So that's the flat, total shithole. And I love the not very nice. I think that's wonderful. This is the headline or the whole ad with the picture. Not a very nice one bedroom flat, but like the budgie, it's cheap UK pun, open plan, has a well used kitchen and if you can call it this, a small lounge. That's the ad. I mean, isn't that charming though? Isn't that nice to say, wow, here's somebody who doesn't want a whole bunch of people rocking up and being disappointed. They just want to tell the truth and say, this is what this is about. You know, this, this flat, flat went in no time. It got tons of coverage, it was on TV and you know, the shitty little flat got, got let in, you know, in a week. That was trust. I trust that estate agent. This one's weird. This is the one that makes everyone nervous. But this is almost my favorite reason for doing insane honesty. And that's. It alienates your less likely buyers. It actively alienates the people who are least likely to, to buy from you anyway. These are people who are going to in B2B where I am. These are long sales cycles. Spending time with prospects is an expensive thing to do and to spend time with the wrong ones is a dumb thing to do. And if you could filter out and chase away the worst prospects, the ones who are absolutely least likely to buy what you're going to do anyway, why wouldn't you do that? That's a good tactic, you know, why not actively get out there and alienate those people? When you think about the vw, if status and you know, the huge car mattered to you, you're not going to buy a vw. There's just no way you're going to buy the Beetle. So it's okay. It's not just okay, it's smart to alienate them, you know, and if you're, you Know if you care that your car rental company is actually the market leader, when you think about it, why the hell should you? But if you do, you're not going to pick Avis. You just won't. So why not alienate those people? My favorite, favorite, favorite example of this whole talk is this. It's the Hans Brinker budget hotel in Amsterdam. Absolute shithole. One year, I think in the 90s, they doubled the number of beds and they raised their prices. When I say double beds, they didn't double the rooms, they literally just ran more beds in. That's a typical room in the Hans Brinker Hotel. And they raised prices and they did one smart thing. After those pretty dumb looking things. They approached the best agency in Amsterdam, Kesselskramer, really, really creative agency. And they thought, well, we don't have a lot of option here but to take the insane honesty approach. And they came out with just a fantastic campaign that took this not very nice place and made it into something of a hero in Amsterdam. This is one of the ads, just so simple and so terrific. This is another one where I knew a few of them and then I googled it and there's just dozens of fantastic executions. You got to check it out. So it's Hans Brincker budget hotel. Google that you know, Hans Brincker campaign and you'll see wonderful things. My favorite one's a little video which it has one of those beds and a pillow on it and the pillow case has this horrible greasy stain in the middle. Really gross. And then in the video a maid comes in with a maid outfit and the white gloves and she takes it, flips it upside down and primps it up and walks out again. Hans Brinkerbrudge Hotel. Just so good. Hans Brinkerbrudge Hotel. Can't get any worse, but we'll do our best. Or things like this. Now a door in every room or now even less service. Now even more noise. Now 5 watt extra in every light bulb. So, you know, in a way they're having fun making fun of marketing in general, but they're also alienating the people that aren't going to pick them. They're just not going to pick them. And if they happen to pick them by accident, they would hate it. They would hate it. They would show up and think, you know, they want their money back. So with these guys, they just say, let's totally alienate the people. You know, if you're on a romantic weekend or you're a family holiday, don't pick us, you know, which is one of the things I really like about insane honesty. It's. It's openly saying who you're not for. It's knowing who you are for and then going for, not just risking alienating people who aren't right for you, but actually actively doing that, going out to alienate them, which is more fun anyway. So that's the fourth, the fifth. It attracts your ideal prospects. So here's why that number four isn't so bad after all. Yes, it alienates you're least likely, but it really sends this great strong message to your ideal prospects. And if you know who your ideal prospects are, the ones who really value the things you have and the ones who devalue the things that you don't have, then this technique is absolutely fantastic for that. Here's one. This is an office building in wood Green. Kind of a nice area of London, but not a nice office building. And the developers who bought it, they didn't have enough money to do what developers always do, which is just stick glass on the outside and pimp it up. They could only do the lobby basically and make that nice and a few other little touches. So they went the insane honesty route. They called it ugly. Ugly. Lovely inside. And Those are like 20 foot high letters on the side of the building. The website's good too. Fancy. Making beautiful business whilst keeping your overheads low will then allow us to introduce ourselves. Hello, we're ugly. You could be too. So, you know, this is alienating. You know, McKinsey and company, you know, or you know, JP Morgan are not going to pick this building, right? Those are the least likely buyers. They want a status building that shouts from the outside that this is a special place. But their ideal prospects, people who actually don't care what the outside looks like, want to be with like minded companies in a funky building in a cool neighborhood of London. That's an ideal prospect and this sends a great, great message to them. And again, in a very tough commercial London market, these guys rented the building out very, very quickly with the strategy. And this is the last one. So why insane honesty? It focuses you on battles you can win. This kind of almost sums up the other five really. It focuses the whole company and it focuses the whole marketing team and all your budget on battles that you can win and takes you out of battles you can't win. And that alone, just from a strategy standpoint is worth giving this a go to say, let's just cut out everything where it's a very low likelihood of success and put all our money behind something with high likelihood of success. The example here is from our own. When I put this piece on SlideShare, which it's up there now, the power of Insane Honesty. At the end, you have to say who we are. We're Velocity. And I thought, well, I can't do the normal blurb there. I got to do an insanely honest one, right? I've got a practice what I'm preaching here. And so what we put in the back was Velocity is a B2B content marketing agency. We're not for the timid, the weak, or the hidebound. We can be annoying by sticking to our guns when other agencies might have surrendered. Sometimes we disappear en masse to places like rome. Clients who want 247365 service may not like that. And we're big on getting our clients to take a stand. So brands with stronger legal teams than marketing teams may find us frustrating. And just writing this before publishing really felt good. I felt like, yeah, that's actually who we are. And those really are companies and clients that we want to chase away. Actively Alienate the timid is actually a few. If you summarize our own content marketing strategy, it's those three words, alienate the timid. You know, we've got a lot of swearing in our marketing and things like that. And it's a similar effect. When I think about the swearing in marketing, we realized this is a digression, but I got the time, so I'm going to tell it, which is we swear a lot in our marketing. I'm just a sweary person and we potty mouth people and, you know, so sue us. You know, we're still nice people, but we just swear. And so I noticed we were swearing in our own marketing, but we weren't swearing in our client marketing at all. And I just. So I did a post and it's called how to Swear in youn Fucking Marketing. And it was examining why and it was a joke post. It started as just a bit of fun to examine it. And it turned out to be really interesting to think about and to write about. And what came out in that post was what interested me anyway was that we see, you know, we swear in our daily conversation. We certainly hear it in our daily conversation. We hear swearing on tv, we hear swearing in movies, we hear it in poetry and books and novels. And absolutely every part of language, every part of speech, they're swearing. Except marketing. Marketing is this little island, this little special kind of speech where you don't do what humans do in every other area of life. And that made me think, you know, that's the issue here. If we want to do marketing that doesn't sound and feel and smell like marketing, what we need to do is find those conventions, those. Those invisible rules, those hidden conventions that say how marketing works and expose them. And one of them is, well, marketing doesn't swear well. It's not written anywhere. It's just too underneath it all to ever write it down. But expose those conventions and then break them, bend them, do the opposite and see what happens. And this insane honesty, this best foot forward, is one of those unspoken conventions of marketing. It's like that's what you do. You just bang the drum and you ignore the bad stuff and you, you know, put a brave face on it. What if we expose that convention and break it? And that's. That's kind of what insane honesty is all about too, is marketing that doesn't feel like marketing feels like a human being talking to you and a likable one. So that's the talk. Here's the six just to remind you. So, first, insane honesty. Putting your best foot or worst foot forward. It surprises and delights, it gets you some attention, and it makes you more likable right from the start because you're the kind of person people want to do business with. Second, it signals confidence, that really rare commodity that makes for great marketing. It says we're good enough to share with you things that we ourselves know aren't our best points. It builds trust, this hugely important commodity in any marketing. It alienates your less likely buyers, which is the scary part, but the really cool part and the most fun part. It attracts your ideal prospects. The people who really, really want what you've got are going to love the technique. And it focuses you on the battles you can win. So it takes the whole company's energy and the whole marketing department's energy where those efforts ought to go. So that's what I'm evangelizing. Actively seek out your weaknesses and share them openly. Give it a try. What I would suggest is, look, if it's scary, write it down. Like when I did that sign off for the Velocity piece first. I had to write it before I published it. So you can at least do that. Just give it a go. Think about the weakness that you've been hiding for a while and see what happens if you take it and write about it and put it right out there, admit it, be proud of it, maybe explain why it is how it is and show it around in the company and if other people. What tends to happen is, in principle, people hate this idea, but in practice, it's actually, whoa, that feels pretty good. Like that description of velocity for felt like that's who we are. I want prospective clients to know these things about us, and I think that's how it will feel for you guys, too, if you give it a go and then go ahead and publish. And the last part of that risk is, if it's not really working, pull the piece or something. So I'd love it if you give it a try. And let me know if you do if you get fired. I'm sure HubSpot has a benevolent fund that can help you out. Don't be tweeting me about it, because it's not my problem. So, yeah, go out and put your worst foot forward and let me know how it goes. Thank you very much. Is it Q and A? I think we. Lots of time. Right. So any. Any Q and A we do have, and you can, if you please, use the microphone.

So we'll be great.

Hi there. Can you hear me? Yep.

That was an awesome presentation. It was to steal one of your words. It was very charming, and I really enjoyed it, and it resonated with me. So I'm going to try to give you, like, my excuse why I'm afraid to do this, and then you can tell me why I'm being a pansy. So I work for a relatively small B2B software company, and I feel like we don't have huge brand awareness. And some of the examples you gave, you're talking about companies that have fairly big brand awareness to start with. So it's like you're trying to introduce yourself to the world, make a first impression, and do it in a really kind of risky way. And so that piece of it gives me pause.

Okay. It's almost like saying, we don't really have the brand equity to gamble on this. You're saying, and I think, you know, you're right. You are being a whistlebath, because the first impressions are the absolute most important. So wouldn't you love. Someone says their first impression is, wow, confident little software company, trustworthy software company and charming software company. Those are great first signals. If they, you know, those first things, they bed down. Like Avis had to fight the perception that you're just another car rental. You don't have to fight that. You can start with this brand, you know, So I think. I think it's a ballsy issue. I think it's a balls thing. It's saying, you Know, actually, you know, we can do this. The one objection that I've got to this, which is someone sometimes says, what if your weakness would alienate your ideal prospects? I mean, it's serious and it would alienate your, the ones you really need to sell to. And my answer to that is, fucking fix that. You don't have a marketing problem, you've got a product problem. And you know, and so you got more important issues. But most people's weaknesses are there because you devalued them. So you're a software company. Let's say you're great at data management, but your data visualization, not so good because it's not a priority yet. I think you can tell people that. And people who need great data visualization won't pick you. But the ones who realize that's not as important, I want the data crunching, they'll love you. So I do think it's a manning up issue or a woman. Thanks. Hi.

That was really great. I've seen this, but I never saw it put down in such a systematic way. But maybe I'm a wuss too, but my company is. We're in the healthcare space and we're a consulting company and we work a lot with nursing homes and we do a lot of compliance.

Right.

So when we're brought in, it's often to help someone avoid going to jail.

Right.

So is there a risk that at some point even a minor weakness can present too great a challenge for even the ideal?

Well, this goes under. This is a really good question. And it goes under the case of, you know, is this a fundamental weakness that would alienate your best prospects? And in your case, you're not going to say, yeah, we lose a few in health care. To be honest, some people die. That's not a good one. But if you say we're really rigorous and our audits take twice as long as other audits, and that sucks, you're not going to like it. And we ask some difficult questions and if you guys don't like being pushed, you're not going to like us. But by the way, you're not going to like the auditors even more. So see how you can take a thing like that and still make it work in a very sober, you know, regulated market? You know, you don't want to be flippant. And none of this is about being flippant or being frivolous or downplaying things that matter or making a joke out of things that matter. So if it came off that way, it definitely not what I mean but I think even in this regulated, serious place you can use this technique and it's conservative. I think, you know, everyone thinks, oh, it's too risky. I hope what I've shown you is actually the opposite is risky. You know, glossing over your weaknesses, that's a risky strategy. Ignoring the elephant in the room, that's a super risky strategy.

Thank you.

Sure.

Can you talk about how to potentially deal with things that are actually fuck ups and not just differentiators?

I think it's, you know, the fuck up part is more in the category of maybe radical transparency and similar issue of honesty. And you know, there is this, there is an application of insane honesty here, which is what the book says and what PR crisis management says is pretty much get the troops in a row and deny shit. So I think it really applies if something goes wrong. I would love it when a company would just say we screwed up. You know, we, you know, the guy who has our database put it on a laptop and left it in a cab and we fired his ass and you know, it'll never happen again. And here are the nine things we're going to do about it. I mean, I guess in crisis it's what you say is important, what you do is the most important thing. But for me it applies even more then because in a crisis or a fuck up the trust in you has shaken the confidence you has shaken. This is the time to show that you know that you are trustworthy and that they can trust you. So I think it very much applies in that situation.

I noticed a lot of your examples were underdog kind of companies. And how do you have examples of this working for a company that has already the majority of the market and is already kind of the big dog and seen as kind of the big dog?

The leaders. Yeah, examples for leaders. So I have been asked if it's a viable strategy for leaders and I really do believe it is. Do I have some good examples of that? Let's see, statesman like big, big leader who did it? I have a nice big file of them and I think some of them must be leaders. None jump to mind. But I just think the same thing absolutely applies. And in fact with leaders they're the most able to. They're the ones who ought to mostly be able to have that confidence to be open and honest. One of the things that leaders tend to never do, for instance, is mention their competitors like we're number one. We're never going to mention anybody else. We don't have to. I Like it when a leader is gracious to a competitor and says so and so over there did something cool, they've got a feature we really admire, we're going to do that too. Or they wrote a good blog post and you know, cred to them. I think that's a lovely thing for a leader to do is to share some of that. So, and you know, some of my examples, they weren't necessarily yet underdog. So VW is a brand new brand, so it wasn't under or over. I suppose you would say they weren't a market leader. But anyway, I would evangelize that it absolutely isn't as effective. But I'm gonna have to dig in my files and see if I've got a good leader example. Good question. Hi. With smaller, more conservative companies, how would you recommend having a marketing department get the executive team or the, or the C suite on board with this kind of strategy? That's a really good question. And I think buy in is the biggest obstacle to the whole thing. And one way is show them this slideshare. Take them through the thinking before you scare them. It's sound thinking and when you see just the result of it, like the Hans Brinker, you'd think, what are you smoking something? You crazy? But if you take them through the thinking first, that helps. And I think, I guess the other is to show examples to your executive team to say, look what worked here, look what happened here. And the third thing is to do that exercise on paper that I was talking about where rather than go in and say, you know that problem we've got, I want to make it my headline, they'll say fuck off. If you say, look at this technique and look at how it works in practice. It's not so scary really. So, you know, there are people, I think the older a marketer is, the more senior a marketer is putting it that way. They got senior in a traditional atmosphere and they're maybe less likely to take it on because they get kind of, you know, marketing 101 gets, gets stuck in you like it's just how you do it. But so it's hard, but I think it's a really sound thing. And I think what you need to be able to do is look someone in the eye and recommend it, knowing that it's a good tactic. Not just that it's a funny headline or something like that, that you can defend the thing and don't expect that it's going to fly through because just as it shocks an audience, it shocks internal People too, they need bringing along. Thank you.

So my company right now, we basically don't acknowledge any of our flaws at all. We're the most awesome product out there according to us.

HubSpot. Not quite.

But I mean, we do have lots of flaws and our competitors point them out all the time. So I like this concept. But how do you go from saying that we're the best product out there, we have no flaws, to then saying these are our flaws? Here they are. Do we just like rip off the band aid and say flaws galore or like, how would you transition?

That's a really, really good question. The transition is something, it's interesting because if you haven't been practicing it, most people, it's okay most brands because, because they haven't lied about their weaknesses, they've just kind of not gone there. And so the transition's not so bad. But if you have, you've just been sugarcoating some things, then you have to manage the transition. And maybe ripping off the band aid is the right idea and just coming right out and saying, you know what, for five years we've said that we were the most fuel efficient. We've looked at the data. Right now we're not the most fuel efficient, but here's why we think that's a good thing. So there are ways to even refer backwards as the to why your messaging may have changed, but it may be that you have to manage and nuance that change a little more carefully than the band aid and only you will know that about your own thing. I think if the DNA of the company is simply no. I mean it's like a kool aid drinking culture, then it's going to be a tough sell. But I just think it's a really refreshing thing, especially hyper competitive markets where the more competitive, the more intense the market, the more unlikely the strategy is, so the greater upside you get from it.

Thank you very much.

Back to the question about internal buy in. Do you think it makes sense to ab test sort of traditional marketing and insane honesty, or is that too wussy? No, it isn't too wussy. I think anything that's testable, why not test it? Absolutely. So take 5% of your traffic if your homepage says something insanely honest. And see, so you know, I'm up. I'm not really about risk. I'm about, I mean, I like, I think having balls and being bold is great in marketing, but you know, recklessness is not really what that's about. And so if you're in an environment where you can test that. Absolutely. I think go for it. I don't think you should feel like, oh, I whisked out there. And my conviction is that. That it'll outperform the timid and it'll do it so dramatically that you'll be glad you tested and you'll have another piece of ammo in your story to defend the strategy. So, no. Yeah, I'm not anti testing that at all. I think that's a good idea. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much.