Check Your Facts

I recently read Hammond's work on Branding Your Business, a tradebook that attempts, more than any other I have encountered, to take a comprehensive look at the notion of brand and the practice of implementing, maintaining, and leveraging it in marketing a product, service, organization, or individual. Given all the topics the author intestinally attempted to cover, I'm most stricken by the lesson implicit in the way the book is written: how fragile a thing is credibility.

It's not unusual for authors to make broad statements about "customers" or "businesses" without an explicit acknowledgement that the observation is a generalization based on personal experience. That much is implicit, and chances are that an author who claims three decades of experience has sufficient experience to generalize - even if he is completely wrong-headed, he's earned the right to some degree of credibility.

It's also not unusual for authors to assert "research proves" or "studies show" some point they care to make without citing the source of the information. Experienced professionals who are attentive and studious are exposed to so much research and study that it's often difficult to recall the exact source of a bit of information. But the danger is that some curious mind may look into it, and given the amount of information that is now conveniently available on the Internet, they may check your facts.

And here is where the trouble begins: memory is an imperfect preservative. An author may present a fact that is skewed in the original source - there's a lot of bad research out there and, if you make the mistake of assuming a source to be trustworthy, your own credibility is married to this assumption. An author may misinterpret research, or faithfully represent (as in re-present) it from a source in which it is misinterpreted. OR the author may quite simply get it wrong himself.

This happens sometimes, and it's expected that readers are generally forgiving, though less so for the print media (where we expect that the publisher has staff to fact-check manuscripts) than online (where a blog post is largely extemporaneous and there is no editorial team to polish it). People make mistakes, often with the best of intentions, and are given some latitude.

But when this is done constantly, the reader becomes overwhelmed by the amount of vague and specious references to research "facts" and the limits of trust and forgiveness have been exceeded ... in this instance, it happened around the middle of the book ... and the esteem an author means to call upon to engage a reader has consumed itself.

While this meditation has focused on the specific phenomenon of a book, my sense it applies to all communications in all media - and is particularly germane to the topic of this particular book: if building a brand is based on communication and trust, it is just as easily undone by playing it fast-and-loose with the truth ... and even when the intent is positive, and there is no clear motive for deception or misinformation, the impact is entirely negative.