Fighting Fire With Fire…
You might not be surprised when I tell you that telling the truth is hardly persuasive these days.
The sad truth is that businesses have invented a whole new way of communicating which is rather deceitful. It’s called “advertising.”
Deceitful advertising is a common method today as honest business people of yesterday realized that telling the simple truth isn’t enough anymore. The result, all too often, was a dramatic loss of business to competitors who used deceitful advertising to sell inferior products.
The honest business person had no choice but to fight fire with fire.
Anyone who believes in this philosophy has certainly never tried to put out a fire. For you will soon realize that the guaranteed result is a nationwide inferno of deceitful advertising. “If the public won’t buy our product for $30, we’ll mark it as $60 and sell it for half price!”
These kinds of business people knew that they couldn’t fool ALL the people ALL of the time. But they could fool some people some of the time, and so it went on.
These kinds of business people are heading for extinction because it’s getting harder to fool ANY of the people ANY of the time.
The real tragedy is that honest business people abandoned the truth in their advertising. It wasn’t the truth that was ineffective; the mistake was assuming it was enough to simply tell it.
If you want the truth to prevail, you have to cause people to realize it. This requires much more skill than to simply tell it.
Honest persuasion is the water that will put out any fire.
“Truth we are told is truth we may not accept; the truth we have realized is the only truth we own.” – Anonymous
-Martin