030176.com : The Life of Mads Kristensen

Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent raises a very important question: In a time of crisis should you tell your customers and employees how bad the situation really is? The question is a great one, because companies - as Valeria rightly notes - are terrified to death about damaging their public image and especially their brand. However, I think they should do it. Tell it all like it is. And there are a couple of, I think, good explanations for that. First of all their is growing distrust out there. Odds are that if you are in any kind of business at risk in the current financial climate, customers and employees won’t believe everything is peachy anyway. Try being a bank going out with a story that you’re unaffected. Su-u-u-re, you are. What a great reason to come clean. The second thing is that people are yearning for real, credible information. Nothing is as painful as not knowing. Trust me. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Having knowledge, even if it’s bad, is far better, because it gives you something to navigate by, a sense of direction. As a consequence of this last point I actually think that companies being brutally honest now will get a lot of credit for it with both customers and employees, so that if they weather the storm, they will come out in the other end being far, far stronger than the competiton.