A man was sitting on his couch one evening, enjoying a book, when he spotted a mouse crawling across his floor. He jumped up and attempted to kill it with his boot, but the mouse scurried under the fridge. The man, now removed from his book and intent on killing the mouse, walked over to the pantry to find a mousetrap. After locating a rather large trap that would surely do the trick, he realized he didn’t have any cheese. No matter, the man thought,

I’ll just put this picture of cheese in the trap. That dumb mouse won’t know the difference.

So, the man put the picture of cheese in the trap and placed it under the fridge.

In the middle of the night, the man was startled from his slumber by the sound of the trap going off.

It worked! That dumb mouse tried to eat the picture of cheese.

He stumbled out of bed, turned the lights on, and spotted the trap sitting under the fridge. He reached down and pulled it out only to find that the picture of cheese was gone and had been replaced by a picture of a mouse.

Action and Reaction

Newton’s Third Law states that forces occur in pairs, one called the action and the other the reaction. They are equal and opposite to each other. We know this law better by saying,

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

But this law is applicable to much more than physics. It applies to our messages. It applies to the interactions we have with others. It applies to the customer experiences we create.

A counterfeit message will produce a counterfeit experience.

The messages we push to our customers need to match up with the experiences they’re having. If they don’t, then they’ll react with the same level of respect they perceive we have for them. If we’re going to promise bliss, if we’re going to set that expectation, then we had better be able to deliver.

The Power of Denial Does Not Apply to Our Customers

Denial is a powerful thing. It can keep us from creating consistent messages. It allows us to live in a fog of rationalization. A fog that clouds our vision and prevents us from seeing the lies we put in our marketing messages and advertisements.

Our customers, however, do not live in that fog. They are looking through crystal clear glass, and they see right through our lies. They expect us to be transparent. When we aren’t, they react accordingly. They produce an equal and opposite reaction.

Perhaps the most clear and measurable statistic of this phenomenon today is our President’s job approval rating. While President Obama campaigned heavily on change and bipartisanship, his tenure in office has been anything but that. I suppose there are many reasons for his steady decline in approval, but I believe the main reason is his inability to deliver on the promise of change he proclaimed during his campaign. Parties aside, this can be seen in many (maybe all?) politicians today.

The point is that we have a decision to make. We can be authentic or we can continue to live in a fog of deniability. We can treat our customers with respect or we can treat them like dumb mice. The choice is ours. Our customers will react accordingly.