Friends with benefits in NYC

“I’ll lie about almost anything but not that”. Reggie, Street Hawker, Fulton Mall, Brooklyn, 2023.

“Don’t piss in my pocket and tell me it’s raining.”

Layer Cake, 2004

The USA is the home of the big sell. 

I was walking down on Fulton Mall, just near our offices in Brooklyn and a guy selling sneakers on the street, was cajoling his latest customer into buying a pair of knock-off Jordon’s.  He was extoling the benefits of how well they were made, the stitching detail and the identical nature of the badge.

 He was selling a benefit by disclosing a flaw in his own truth.

Funnily enough, near our apartment in Bed-Stuy, there’s a truck selling Indian food. It’s there everyday and everyday it has queues of people outside.

On the side of the truck is a picture of a man in chef’s whites, pointing to a trophy. The obvious implication is that the food is so good it’s award winning. Unfortunately, whoever designed the image wasn’t award winning at photoshop, as the man’s head is of a different ethnicity to his outstretched arm.

These are two laughable examples of selling benefits, but in laughing at them, it’s only made me reflect on the egregious suffering of us poor consumers who have to put up with equally laughably bad products and services, often from brands who should know better.

Sometimes I don’t know who’s more of a huxter, the man on the street telling me he’s not lying to my face, or the dairy manufacturer, whispering sweetly to me in beautiful prose that the yogurt I’m feeding my daughter is pure and Organic, whilst if I go to the small-print I can see it also contains as much as 5 cubes of sugar.

Or the airline showing me glamorous images of attractive and diverse pilots and air stewards, but who won’t sit my husband with my 2yr daughter and I on a long haul flight unless I pay significant dollar for a specific seat assignment.

We talk about the say/do gap in consumer behaviour all the time. It’s imperative in research that we make sure we are observing what people actually do, not just what they say. I’m not sure brand owners are paying the same attention to their own behaviour.

The brand say/do gap If you are making something to sell be that something to eat, or something to use then you have to be clear that what you say, is not at the expense of what you do. 

Say/do is all about trust.  If you say something but don’t do something, it erodes trust.

For example, who do you trust less right now, a hawker on the street, an advertising exec or a politician?

Well right back in the good old days of 2018, when President Trump had not long been elected and we’d all just been through the trauma of Brexit in the UK, a poll was done which suggested that in fact the least trust-worthy people in society were people who work in advertising.

Not politicians, not estate agents, not bankers.

Advertising people.

"People hate advertising, they fucking truly and actually hate it... And this is all the agencies' and advertisers' fault." Joanna Coles, former content chief at Hearst

People hate it because we are all so aware of the yawning chasm of disappointment that so often now exists, between a dream you see on TV and then the experience in real life.

It’s the brand equivalent of Instagram Vs reality.  What you see isn’t what you get, often not even remotely

And it’s not products they are usually selling. 

If it was just pictures of burgers we had to worry about then I probably wouldn’t be so irritated, but it isn’t. Often there are absolutely no pictures of any food or the product in sight.

 What’s often now the sell is a purpose or a cause. Nothing wrong with that, brands absolutely should be leading the way, but when it’s so uncomfortably in pursuit of sales at the expense of a good product experience it can feel like the world is against you as a consumer.

• The pack that won’t open easily.
• The ‘healthy’ food that is packed with unhealthy ingredients.
• The non-alc drink that tastes like a mix of arse and death.
• The online app that is so frustrating to use you want to throw your phone against a wall.
• The lack of customer service when things don’t go to plan.

For example, I recently took a trip to a zoo near us, with my daughter. She was so excited.

We got there and the lady in the ticket booth pointed to a QR code and said without humor that we had to buy tickets online. Only problem was that we were in the middle of Prospect Park, which is a notorious internet black hole.  Cue, spending 15minutes waving my arms around trying to find some signal and get a website to work with just about the most frustrating & glitchy UX you have ever seen. Pleading with the lady to just sell us a ticket, whilst reading a sign that said “for your comfort and ease we can only admit persons who have purchased a ticket online.”

This is why brands feel more un-trustworthy than politicians. “Don’t piss in my pocket and tell me it’s raining.” Exactly.

Things that work for consumers instead are:

1. Being humorous – your brand is not that important in the grand scheme of things.
2. Being straight with people – not authenticity (yuck) but just being straight with people. If you need to increase prices tell people, and tell them why.
3. Spend money on your actual product & service – the things that drive great experiences, good customer services, products that work.

There are many things that people put up with in this world, I think we could all do without being gaslit by brands and businesses that pretend to act in our interests whilst doing the exact opposite.