Honesty as a Marketing Strategy?

I used to work at a tv station that was (still is) located right next to Tampa Bay.  We knew if a strong hurricane were to threaten the bay area that our building, sitting in a level A flood zone, would have to be evacuated. That was a problem. 

We solved the problem by finding a facility on high ground and equipping it with everything we would need to continue to broadcast if the main facility was evacuated.  Invested a lot of money.  Good solution.  We thought we should tell the consumers about it.

My team planned a commercial that laid out the problem, explained the solution and promised that we were better prepared than ever to serve the community should a storm come our way.  Turn a negative into a positive.  It was a good, open, honest message.  And for that very same reason it never made it to air.  I was instructed to never acknowledge in our marketing a weakness and to re-write it.   A spot that I thought would be attention-grabbing became utterly ignorable. 

This story came back to me today as I read an article on MediaPost about brand loyalty and the brands that currently enjoy the most loyalty.  Interesting stuff.  Amazon is #1 this year, displacing last year's leader, the I-Phone.

Buried at the bottom of the article was the fact that two quick service restaurants made the top 100.  McDonald's was #90 in the study and edging it out at #89 was Domino's Pizza.

Domino's Pizza... the QSR with the most customer loyalty in 2011.  Do you remember its advertising this year?  They ran the soon-to-be-famous (I predict) mea culpa campaign.  They actually read customer complaints about their pizza on air.  These included such gems as:  "Worst pizza I ever had," and "Totally devoid of flavor," and "The sauce is like ketchup."  The spots included the president of the company vowing to make things better.  The original spots were followed by spots that showed how they responded to the customer complaints.

And today they have more customer loyalty than any other business it their category.  Was this campaign a gutsy call?  No.  It was just real smart.  They could have gone the old "New and Improved!" route.  "Better Than Ever!"  Don't think about mentioning why it's new or improved.  Just say it is and shout it out loud.  Those tactics have worked in the past.

Not anymore.  Not today.  Today's consumers, bombarded by intrusive advertising everywhere they turn, tune out the "same-old blah, blah, blah."  It's utterly ignorable.  You know what stands out today?  Honesty.