Wine, charlatans, and good experience

Good old honesty should still rule the day.

At the very least, a good experience should not involve lying to or intentionally misleading people.

To what extent it's OK to omit certain details and shape perceptions, I don't know, exactly. To me, it always comes back to "dont lie to people, and don't cheat people."

People crave seduction and will pay big money for it, again and again and again.

People loathe deception, and will spend big money to avoid it, and to extract vengeance for being deceived.

You are asking if it's okay to lie to customers if it makes them happy. If "customer experience" is your religion, your guiding principle in all things, then sure, it's okay to lie. If you have a personal ethical problem with lying to your customers, then of course it's not okay. To me, old-fashioned ethics trumps all, even if it means giving your customer a subpar experience.

Are you expecting anyone to answer this any differently -- that is, to take the position that it's okay to lie to customers? I'd love to hear that argument.

Anyway, I'm curious: In what way have you wrestled with this in real client situations?

Of course is easy to cheat people, especially in the digital world. The internet is a screenshield that may easily disguise a wheeler-dealer into a decent and respectable company. But, in my opinion, it's better to give the real thing, always. For two main reasons: first, you're not supposed to fool your customers and second, should they discovered such a swindle, you'll be quickly out of business.

It reminds me of the college trick of serving a keg of O'Douls non-alcholic beer and seeing who acts drunk. It's all about perception and environment.

In my opinion, there are too many scams and fraudulent claims on a daily basis that grab the attention of the ignorant and piss off and confuse the intelligent. I believe honesty still goes a long way. Keep your company/product real and you'll be giving a better experience to the customer/consumer in the long run. I have always respected companies that keep it honest and admit when at fault; It's not fun to admire a company that has given you a 'good deal' and then find out through the news that they've been hiding something all along.

What you should offer your customers is correctly labeled products. You can make your personal recommendations as to what you think is best, or best value, but presenting a fake as the real thing is downright dishonest, even if it is more appreciated than the real thing.

Otherwise you are treating your customers as if they were stupid, and that is not good even if the assumption is justified.

To answer Christopher Fahey's question...

When a client calls and says, "We want you to run [flavor of the month] method for us," we say, in not so many words, "Flavor of the month won't help you," and we sometimes lose the business. Other consultants might say, "The client wants the experience of that hyped-up thing, so let's give it to them."

In other industries I could point out practices of misleading advertising - not out-and-out lying, but certainly bending reality for the purposes of the revenue stream.

In the book business I could point out examples of books that promise to solve all the reader's problems in no time, without the pain of learning anything new... versus a book that really can help people, though it requires them to read and learn.

So I'd say it's not really a stark question of "lying," but more about the tradeoff between creating something good and just *promising* something good.

The problem with deceiving people, even if it initially gives them a great experience, is that once they find out they've been deceived, they will hate you for it.

Obviously, in many ways a consumer can not be deceived. There's too much transparency in a lot of products. For instance, if you buy a ticket for the new Bruce Willis movie, but Bruce wasn't in it, that certainly wouldn't fly, and you'd demand (and probably get) your money back. You may have read mixed reviews, so you know what you're getting into, for the most part (as long as Bruce is the star!).

But the wine issue is interesting - and a situation where most people could easily be fooled, due to their expectations.

One final thought: Group behavior will often drive people to think and act differently than they would on their own. In the wine tasting, for example, if the 'leader' of the group (whether real or perceived) liked the first wine, chances are that most people in the group would agree. If he didn't like it, I suspect many would go along with that too. So it may be that if the leader of the group was perceptive enough to get past the label, it wouldn't have mattered to the rest of the group.

buyers are liars

If you work for a company with a good product or service -- and of course we all do -- then you have already acquired the context, the information about the context, in which that product shines. You know the product.

In order for your customer to have a good experience, you must also communicate or more pertinently transmit to them, so that they receive it, the same context. You may do so theatrically or plainspoken; it's not deception.

When you play golf with someone, do you by intent let them score better than you? Some salesmen do, maybe about 11 percent. This is no more honest than trying to improve your own score surreptitiously, and, being inauthentic, is doomed to eventual failure in any case. Save your effort for communicating the context, or how about this: improve the product or the service!

I back John and Dave with the honesty comments -- that must come first. Think though, have any of you ever been to Disneyland or Disneyworld or any other fantasy showcase? - They present a fanciful experience that is not true or accurate, but... You've not been duped into the experience, you go in EXPECTING it to be more than real and you'll pay a fair price to participate in the experience...sometimes again and again if the quality of the experience lasts..

I think there's a fine line between lying, spin, and carefully tuned packaging.

An example brought up in Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is the story of Christian Brothers vs. E&J bourbon. CB had held a big share of the market for years, and so was surprised to notice slippage. Both are not particularly good and have relatively low advertising budgets.

They had someone do a couple of studies and the difference turned out to be the bottle. Whichever one was served in a more ornate looking bottle, the users rated as tasting better.

So while there's a difference between a counterfeit and a real thing, a lot of times quality is not the most important part of the user experience.

You should give them the fake, tell them it's fake, charge for the fake, and tell them why it's the fake.

One would have to redefine "good" to argue that an enjoyable experience, not based on reality, is superior to truth. Reality always wins, in the end. All the rest is simply constructing houses of cards.

Well I agree with Christopher Fahey, I wonder who will come up with the perfect argument for lying to your customer. Yet it happens all the time. Why is that?

In our personal lives, we sometimes lie because telling the truth is not always the best thing. Telling your sister that her new born is a very ugly baby is never a wise move, so we tell her that we think the baby is very cute or looks exactly like his dad. A white lie we call it.

But when it comes to business, should we tell white lies? Yeah perhaps we should, most of the products are not a 100% perfect. Most of the times because it's impossible. But if we were to tell the truth to a customer who ask you whether the car you are selling him never has trouble. Well, he probably wouldn't buy it.

So it's a bold statement, I know, but sometimes people do not want to hear the truth and they pay for the feeling a product or service gives them. It's not real in the sense that you can hold it, but it's there. But when that feeling disappears for some kind of reason, people feel deceived because they forget or just don't realize that they had actually paid for something that is not touchable.

Of course you should not deceive customers.

But worth noting that we accept and practice inequities every day, both in products (look at the profit margins on software) and services (we pay a lawyer $250 an hour for advice because we perceive it's worth that much). Only a lawyer would argue that legal expertise is worth ten times a teacher's salary or 250x a mom's salary.

Charging a lot for wine doesn't make it taste better, only increases the taster's investment in a positive outcome.

Yes, honesty is the best policy -- lying and cheating is bad -- but part of building a good customer experience is letting your customers know how good they've got it. It's not enough to serve the best bottle of wine, it's also important to reinforce the experience with markers that underscore the quality of the wine: reverential handling, proper decanting, perfect glassware, ridiculous price, etc.

Folks need to feel smart and sophisticated in their choice of vendors, and the best customer service recognizes that need.

Honesty and integrity go hand and hand. Without one you can't have the other. Therefore, honesty is the best policy. It prevents the need to tell additional lies or spin the story, further down the line.

I loved those stories!

My opinion:

It is NOT better to give customers the fake thing. If that became the standard practice, we'll be eating perfect pesticide-riddled produce marketed as organic. Synthetic diamonds would be passed off as the real thing. And eventually we'd learn that our venison in a balsamic reduction was more akin to soilent green.

It is for this reason the Fair Trade label has been successful and why it's forced participating food producers to improve their products, to compete with non-Fair Trade products: because they are required to follow the chain of custody. The consumer expectation is that the product will be good as well as having been produced following Fair Trade principles. To address your question - this is an example of how it was made impossible to fool consumers but at the same time requires improving the product to deliver a good experience.

Just as many rare, aged things can be appreciated for their flaws (including smelly cheese and people), consumers should set their own expectations that products priced highly because of their scarcity or the method they were produced may not equal a more palatable physical experience that perhaps a newer, more widely available product could provide.

By enjoying the spiritual or otherwise cerebral experience of luxury goods, consumers can stop companies from feeling like they should turn to deception to provide a "delightful" experience.

Disclaimer: I will pay $60 for a pound of good chocolate and will opt for $2 chocolate if it's better than a $6 bar so the above really reflects my personal values.

Mark Hurst asked: "...is it still a good experience if you have to fool your customers to give it to them?"

As evidenced by the anecdotal examples, the quality, or "good-ness" of the experience is all about consistency, not authenticity. I'd say that, (ethical and legal considerations aside) to preserve your good customer experience, all you must do is: be consistent. If you've been selling them something (even fake wine) and they've been liking it, don't suddenly change what (or how!) you deliver, when customers come back "for more".

Same goes for "giving them what they need" vs. "giving them what they ask for". If whatyou've done in the past has worked, and your customers are happy, and come back for more, handle this delimemma the same way you've handled it before.

If in the past, you've given clients flash when they asked for Web 2.0, even though you know they wanted AJAX and they've come back for more, give them more.

If on the other hand, you've historically chosen to give clients honest advice, even at the risk of losing a project at the outset, they've probably come to expect that sort of brutal honesty from you, and will surely come back for more of that too, at some point, and will be sorely disappointed if you've started serving "what you need" when they order "what I want" off the menu.

"Stated another way, is it better to give customers the real thing, even if they won't like it as much?"

Who are we to presume to know what they will and won't like? Our job is to give the customer what they want and what they want is what they have come to expect.

I guess this consistency-only rule applies just to repeat customers, so your ethical conundrum is still unsolved for the case of new customers. In that case, I'd say: don't treat repeat customers one way, and new customers another. The double standard will come back to bite you when you forget who was new when, who gets "the old treatment" and who gets the new, leading again to accidentally giving your customers inconsistent service, which invariable unsettles and disappoints them.

So if you've been serving fake wine, and decide to sell genuine wine, you have to do the hardest thing: announce to all customers that the previous wine was found to be, er, of lesser quality, and that you are now serving only the finest. Then treat everyone to the new you.

"Or is it better to give them the fake thing, and call it real, in order to save lots of money, even while your customers are none the wiser (or even prefer the fake thing)?"

Mark, if this question really vexes you, you should tell us what you're really talking about... :-)

And then I'll tell you: be consistent. I suspect you've told clients the truth in the past. If you're planning to change that, you're in for trouble -- not because you'll be less honest with your customers in the future, but because you'll be delivering a different service to the customers who the way you've been treating them when they discover, to their surprise, that the Good, Creative Treatment has been unexpectedly replaced with something that is somehow different.

Something else to consider: what if the consumer WANTS to be deceived? For example, the luxury goods market isn't based on better products, but on better packaging, messaging, and marketing. Is Mercedes unethical for charging 3 times what a Toyota costs, simply because they have a more prestigious brand? Maybe, but certainly consumers who want to pay more for the perceived sense of wealth are to blame as well.

I'm for being honest. If the focus is on profit, then it's easier to give people what they want, but this lowers standards

It may be trite, but it's true -- honesty is the best policy. One doesn't need to remember who was told what or accidentally "spill the beans" later. When a customer finds out you haven't been ethical in your dealings with them, your reputation is ruined and virtually impossible to resurrect. And how many people will the tell about your unethical behavior? It's easier to be honest all the way around.

Good stuff. I love stories like this. Dr. Robert Chialdini dug into why we as consumers take these kinds of "shortcuts " to make decisions (expensive = good). Diana Wynne said it best, I'll pay more for wine as insurance that it's a great experience in the absence of wine knowledge.

Long term no one can put a crap in a box and expect consumers to say it's a "good experience" but if using the power of influence helps insure a good experience for our customers, we should use it. Carefully.

Too much to ask?

This is a very slippery slope. It is all too easy for a profit-minded company to fool itself into believing the best thing to do for a customer is to deceive him or her. Bad idea.

That said, authentic experiences can still be packaged in a manner that enhances how people perceive them. I pay $2.50 for a cup of green tea not because it tastes so much better than the green tea at home, but because stopping at a tea/coffee shop is a social experience in a friendly environment. I'm paying 50 cents for the tea, and $2 for everything that comes with it.

A story from the Philippines where I live.

Tanduay produces several grades and colors of domestic rum. There's a noticeble quality difference between Tanduay ESQ Gold (80 cents for 750ml) versus Tanduay Superior aged for 12 years, selling for five times higher at $4 for 750ml.

When I serve guests Tanduay ESQ in a fancy cut-glass decanter, guests always praise the smoothness and good taste of the rum, asking for a refill, never realizing they've been unconsciously fooled by the fancy container.

as a customer, if I order a 6000$ bottle of wine, I would like to have the original. However, high end customers are generally ignorant about the products they are ordering and what to expect from them.

It has been know always that brand names are more valuable to consumers than the actual product. People go ahead and buy items just for the brand's sake. This trend is more visible in growing economies like India where increasing spending power of the middle class drives purchasing.

There are examples of local manufacturers passing off as american/european brands just by keeping fancy brand names(like Cantabil). And people very happily go ahead and buy it, just for the brand name sake.

It might work in the short term to pass of cheap goods branded well, but this is not a long term strategy. Consumers will realize at one point that the quality behind the brand is not up to the mark and will dump the brand.

I might be naive, but I am for honesty. Even if it's less profitable, on the long run I tend to believe it would pay back. Moreover, I encourage educating customers for quality. Pour quality could also mean pour production, or workers' lack of rights.. why be a part of such a chain?

I agree with the all the comments so far - it's not ethical or a good idea to fool your customers just because you can. But what seems to resonate in the comments, and even in the story, is that people are willing to pay for the good experience and by extension have the expectation that if it's a good experience, the products must be superior.

So the trick is, sell them on the good experience, for which they are happily paying a premium, not so much the products, which could be average. But there's the fine line: you can't imply that your products are above average if they aren't just because the experience you offer is.

Here's a tired old example: I like going to Starbucks for coffee. The truth is, I make better cappucino at home. But I'm not really paying for their coffee, I'm paying for the experience. I've never felt like they are trying to sell me the best coffee around - just the best coffee experience around. That's why I don't feel duped.

Mark,
your examples are interesting to discuss but also, I think, misleading to the point of the topic. Knowing that the "quality" of a wine invokes such a subjective response depending on the palate and experience of the consumer. What if the genuine Petrus was presented to the group first? Would thay have sent it back initially or sent back the following two wines because they tasted different fromt he first? The counterfeit wine may have been more pleasing to the palates of the group, and not necessarily because it was less expensive or even lower in quality, but still rejected due to the fact they were expecting it to taste like the first bottle. Additionally, knowing your audience is a huge factor in this exercise. This Las Vegas group may not be wine conosseurs. They could be beers drinkers who won big in the casino and wanted to order the most expensive bottle on the menu to celebrate. Without a controlled group situation, the results will most likely be different from table to table. Therefore, it is the responsibility of us, as providers of a service or product, to advise the client in the most honest and straighforward way possible. This to avoid any misconceptions or possible future confrontation with the client that they "didn't get what they paid for". Of course there is always going to be the guy who wants the $6000 bottle no matter what you say to them, so trusting your people to provide the highest quality product is always #1.

To relabel and sell a cheap wine as an expensive one is unethical and a case of fraud.

If it is OK, why not all the knock off products such as Rolex watches and the huge variety of clothing with false labels that can be purchased almost everywhere in China.

BG

After thinking about this, personally I would rather be educated about why a choice is better or what its features are, then to have a good experience. If I only know one thing and have no knowledge of the better option, I've been cheated. Honesty is still the best way. The immediate experience might suffer a little bit, but in the long run,it is better for the customer.

The problem with misleading a customer is that the perception can come back and bite you hard. While at first they may enjoy the product and have a great time with it, should they find out that they were mislead in any way then everything changes and suddenly they have turned against you. Instead of telling their friends about the great time they had they talk about how they were tricked and mislead. Case in point is the whole fiasco Sony had with the root kit on cd's. People at first were happy to have their new music to listen to and would probably recommend that artist to their friends but once people learned about how they were tricked into installing something that was harming their computer they were furious and boycotted Sony. That bit of deception really set Sony music back for a while and also began to rub off on their other divisions. It was really ugly and really did a lot of damage to their reputation.

People bought the product, not good experience. It's an ethical issue.

K.I.S.S. - Seems pretty simple though not always easy: if the sum of all factors (purchase/use setting, price, presentation, etc.) which create user expectations, are met or exceeded by the user's 'experience' of the product or service - that is GOOD. It is the user's expectations that determine his/her satisfaction and likelihood to repeat and or recommend to others.