Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Lying

Why Politicians Lie (and Marketers too)

I thought, now that the elections are behind us, and we have been inundated with thousands of hours of hyperbolic advertising, debating, and otherwise misleading statements about such and such doing this and that, I thought I would ponder why politicians (and to a large degree marketers) can seemingly be saying two different things about the same subject. Are they just liars, or is there something completely different going on? As it is often said, there are two sides to every coin, and in debating anything you should be able to equally argue for the pro or con of an idea. I think this little testimony from a Texas legislator sums it up best. In 1952, Armon M. Sweat, Jr., a member of the Texas House of Representatives, was asked about his position on whiskey. What follows is his exact answer (taken from the Political Archives of Texas): "If you mean whiskey, the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the h...

Your Customers (and your Mother) Always Know

Over the years, I have been amazed at the number of businesses that think they can "get away" with something with their customers. Either by lowering product standards, charging for useless features, making it more difficult to get customer service, or just flat out lying to them. So, I will explain why this is so detrimental with a short little story about a mother and her son and the son's female roommate. It involves the eternal knowledge and wisdom of mothers, and if you try to “pull something over their eyes” they have a way of using your own words to pry the truth out...just like your  customers. ___________________________________________________ A Mother comes to visit her son for dinner. He lives with a female roommate. During the course of the meal, his mother couldn't help but notice how pretty her son's roommate is. Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between her son and his ro...