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Call it the Spitzer Effect: No one can take anything anyone says at face value anymore. In fact, more often than not, what they say might be the complete opposite of what they do. Putting aside the fascinatingly twisted “shadow” psychology on public display here, what are we to make of it all?

Perhaps the most jaded response I’ve heard to this latest shocker is the, “is this really such a big surprise?” response. Well, yes! At least it was to me. Maybe I live in a little house on the prairie where we expect people’s walk to match their talk, but yes, it was a surprise. Seems that some of the world lives in permanent Survivor mode, tensed and ready, only momentarily shocked, but in the end, surprised? Not so much.

We simply don’t know whom to believe anymore, so all too often we choose to believe no one. It’s a natural defense mechanism to so much dissonance. Cynicism becomes common sense.

Oh, brother! Are we in trouble now! At precisely the time in history when things seem so broken that we need someone to believe in more than ever, cynicism is getting the upper hand. (Wait! I hear you say, what about Barack? We’ll get to that in a minute.)

Of course it’s not fair to place the blame for this at Elliot’s feet. He’s just the latest in a long line of liars paraded before an increasingly jaded public: Jim Bakker, Ken Lay, Roger Clemons, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, name your favorite villain. Those who say one thing and do another, who lie effortlessly, who use so much dastardly double speak that George Orwell himself would blush at the crassness. No wonder trust in public figures is at an all time low.

Now, the majority of us are good, hard-working, honest folk. That’s true. And our actual daily experience of honesty doesn’t grab the headlines. Also true. So our own reality-based bubble doesn’t contain the horror played out on screens of various sorts around the world. True. True.

Still, the headlines do shape the culture and the perception is that all too often those with high public profiles will be judicious with the truth. That goes for religious leaders, elected officials, superstars . . . and corporations and their brands.

If you’re in the business of trying to raise your public profile, as most brands have to be, then watch out, you’re about to raise suspicion. In the public domain we’re all trying to earn and spend the same kind of currency — fame, for want of a better word — and the exchange rate is moving in the wrong direction. Fame is increasingly about infamy. It’s not just the obvious villains who have taken us there, just check out the tabloid magazines the next time you’re in Lucky’s.

And so for those of us who help determine what companies say, and often say it for them in clever headlines and funny films, I wonder if the gig isn’t up, somewhat. We live in a world where it matters less what you “say” anymore, only what you do and keep on doing. Or at least, what you say matters not one jot until people see it backed up by deeds. This is the Era of Deeds. The whole world lives in the state of Kansas, the Show Me state.

Deeds tell us what you believe in far more than anything you say. Deeds are the products you make, the experiences you create, how you spend your money and energy, what you do in the world. Deeds are about seeing with your own eyes that you actually can get 50 mpg in your Prius if you drive it right, that the Peet’s coffee did just get ground right in front of your eyes, that the Manager of the Umpqua Bank really did just play Wii Bowling in his store, that a bowl of Quaker Oats really does sustain you better than a Pop Tart. These are small, but real, personal experiences and they convey so much more than some misplaced ‘image campaign’ ever can. Seeing is believing only when you see it for yourself out there in the real world unmediated by the screen.

So the future has to be partly about putting your money into creating really good experiences. Surely Comcast could spend its quarter of a billion dollar ad campaign on actually training technicians, actually keeping appointments, actually providing excellent customer service rather than saying ‘how can I provide you with excellent customer service?” when they eventually pick up the phone. It might be harder, but it’s surely the only thing that will work long term.

Ray Davis of Oregon’s Umpqua Bank knows this. His “World's Greatest Bank” slogan is less a tagline and more a bar set everyday by everyone who works at his 181 stores, where they need to prove day in day out that they are worthy of such a claim.

Richard Reed of Innocent Drinks in the UK knows this, too, which is why he spends an inordinate amount of time and money working around a logistical system designed to prevent him putting real fruit in his fruit smoothies.

Neither of these brands has built them by advertising. It’s interesting how few of the new brands have. Google, Wii, Prius are all deed brands.

But if you have such truths then advertising can partly be about “the truth well told” (if advertising is necessary at all). When it is incontrovertibly true like the coffee at Peets, and Wii at Umpqua, or just about anything Apple says about its products (okay, apart from the iPhone’s email) then you’ve got demonstrably better stuff and people can see it for themselves. The truth — real truth, not made up marketing truth — will win out if sustained over time.

And if you’re lucky enough to have all of this then it gets really interesting. Then you can start using your “advertising” as the deeds themselves. Your communication can be a gift from a trusted friend, a moment of joy, exhilaration, melancholy, love, hysteria, that briefly punctuates the daily torrent of detritus gushing your way from the screens in your life. Your advertising can be this because you’re delivering on all your other promises and no one feels let down. Your communication doesn’t have to try to persuade because your other deeds have.

These brands are few and far between, but so are brands that can claim to be The World’s Greatest anything with a straight face and get away with it. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen and that it shouldn’t be a goal. Sometimes there is something to believe in.

Which brings us back to Barack. His speech about race in America was a great speech. And a great deed. By refusing to do what most politicians would have done and thrown a family member under the bus, he behaved differently. This wasn’t a speech so much as it was an action which spoke volumes.

Despite The Spitzer Effect, as debilitating as it can be, one of the things that makes human beings human is their capacity to believe in someone or something — their need to believe in someone or something — because, as Vaclav Havel puts it “[hope is] . . . a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation about the world”. 

We have this capacity within us. It is tested more than we’d like, the bar is raised ever higher by the Spitzers of the world, and yet it endures. Audacious indeed.

And in that context, only a few people, or things, will ever be able to become beacons of hope. And so when we see something that holds this possibility, whether it be as trivial as a cup of coffee, or a car, or as important as a politician, we should run toward it with open arms, because we need it to go on, to sense a better future, whether it materializes or not:

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” Havel

Mark Barden is the lead partner of Eat Big Fish in the US. Eat Big Fish is a consulting company specializing in challenger thinking and behavior.

 

Posted by Ed Cotton