A former colleague of mine often began his statements with “To be honest…” and we talked about it one day after I mentioned to him how frequently he used the phrase. I asked him if he said it as a discloser – or if it meant everything else he said was a fabrication. He hadn’t noticed how often he said it, and obviously he didn’t mean to imply the rest of his statements weren’t quite as honest or believable, but it got me thinking about how habits and patterns of speech can impact the message we are trying to send and the way it is received.

The impact of speech delivery affects the message itself

There is no doubt the way you deliver a message affects the takeout from your audience. If a speaker presents in a dull monotone voice, it doesn’t really matter how interesting the content, they’ll likely lose their listener’s attention simply due to boredom. That being said, a lively and humorous delivery can keep an audience engaged and satisfied, even if the content isn’t so enlightening.

Bad speech habits

We all get into bad speech habits. Using too many ‘ums’ is distracting, as is a pattern of peppering your speech with ‘like’ or ‘so’. More recently the Kardashians have pushed the term ‘literally’ as a way of expressing excitement e.g. “I’m literally beside myself with excitement”. Clearly, they aren’t ‘literally’ beside themselves because of the fundamentals of physics, but ‘so, like, whatevs!’

The meaning behind ‘to be honest’

Using the term ‘to be honest’ is more of a way to give time to get your thoughts together. Similar to the use of ‘um’ it provides a pause to think about what you’re going to say next. It could also be used as an indicator that your statement is going to be more direct, like the term ‘to be frank’. The problem with ‘to be honest’ is that hearing the phrase doesn’t increase my trust in the person, but more likely makes me distrust what they’re telling me because I shouldn’t have to hear that proviso before any statements they make.

Are we all professional liars?

According to research, each person lies on average four times per day. This means you can probably trust most statements people make, but at least four things they are saying every day shouldn’t be trusted. So-called ‘little white lies’, those lies that aren’t designed to cause injury or hurt, probably make up the majority of those daily four lies.
• Telling your colleagues that you’re late because the car wouldn’t start, when in reality it was because you stayed up binging on Netflix and got up later than you should have.
• Telling the school you couldn’t attend the P&C meeting because you were working, but really you just couldn’t be bothered.
• Ticking the box saying you have read the terms and conditions when all you did was a half-hearted scroll until you could move on to the next section.
These are all perfectly acceptable and understandable lies we need to make in order to stay sane. But there are some instances where the lies we tell aren’t so little, and whether they are planned or not, the outcome is surely going to cause pain, loss and regret.

Building trust

Whether it is with your colleagues, friends, family or customers, building trust is an important part of building your brand. You want to be known as trustworthy and reliable for people to want to spend time and or money with you.

Building trust with your friends

Everyone has at least one friend who is a bit flaky. They never arrive on time for gatherings, they often ‘forget’ to pay their share of the bill and they tell you they are staying home only to find out on their Facebook page they were out with another group of friends. These are the people you can’t rely on and you know that because time and again they have let you down. But you probably still consider them to be your friend as you share a history with them. No, you can’t always rely on them, but they’ve been part of your story for a long time and you would be more likely to forgive them than to forgive a newer acquaintance.

Building trust with your colleagues

A workplace provides a lot of interesting dynamics. When starting out at a company where you don’t know anyone, it always takes time to work through the issues of building trust. That means you may not be part of important discussions and decision making until you have developed some relationships and wins on the board. Regardless of your previous experience and success, very often you must start again from scratch when beginning a new role. This can even happen from within the same company. New teams often have very different dynamics and culture, so you need to learn the nuances of the environment in order to be successful and considered a reliable and trusted team-player. The team wants and needs to trust you, so you have to learn the rules of engagement.

Building trust in your brand

The same criteria of trust building can be applied to a brand. Your customers want to be able to rely on you. The difference is, they are only likely to give you one chance to get it right. Unlike months or years that have probably gone into a friendship where you are more likely to cut them some slack, if your product or service fails to deliver on your promise, they are unlikely to buy from you again. And this is where your messaging can be so critical. Overpromising and underdelivering signal the death of your brand’s success and only a longstanding affiliation and or some very quick and smart customer retention work may save this relationship (that is jumping through a lot of giant hoops).

Take care with making promises

Marketing your brand, product and services involves putting your best foot forward. When determining a value proposition, you are looking for the things that set you apart from your competition, but, that doesn’t mean elevating your offer so it is no longer the truth. Unless you can back up your statements (promise) with reality, your customers are going to feel like they’ve been duped. While this might work for companies who don’t care about repeat business, it’s still going to be damaging to your brand.
Social media, chatrooms and other digital platforms have increased the opportunity for immediate customer feedback and it’s very difficult to control your brand’s narrative if the public perception is that you are not delivering on your promise. You have to be able to back up your claims. Find and highlight the value you are providing through a thorough analysis of your competition. A good competitor analysis is essential to creating your value proposition and will create a foundation for your sales and marketing strategy. To be honest, you’re going to struggle without it.

Rhonda Locke is a highly experience marketer and brand champion and is the Founder and Director of Unlocke Creative.