Why car companies avoided telling the truth about their cars and why you shouldn’t?

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There was a time when cars didn't have seat belts.

There was even a time when car makers hesitated to equip their cars

with seatbelts although they could.

The reason was that they feared bad publicity.

After all, equipping your car with seat belts in a way gives the impression that

the cars were kind of unsafe so that there was actually a need for the seatbelts.

Which could, as they reasoned back then, scare customers and keep them from buying.

And so they decided to not tell the whole story about their cars, but

rather hide the fact that cars do, as a matter of fact, crash sometimes.

And they hoped that no one notices it.

Today we have way safer cars because people who cared surfaced the whole story.

And its book “Unsafe At Any Speed”, Ralph Nader pointed out how unsafe cars

actually are and that equipping a car with seat belts is not a sign of weakness

but a sign of taking responsibility for the fact that cars do crash and

protecting the customers and providing them with the safest possible experience.

That book opened the flood gates so that today we have actually legislation that

not only requires cars to be equipped with seat belts, but to actually use them.

So obviously the best way to deal with the truth was not to hide the problem,

but to face it, deal with it, and improve the product based on what you see.

A good question to ask always is this:

if your customers knew everything that, you know, would they still buy?

Many companies don't trust that their customers really would.

And so they bend the truth and maybe even hide parts of it.

But some companies act very differently.

They use this exact same question as a motivation to improve the product.

And not only will these companies end up with superior products, marketing

for them will be way easier because all they need to do is tell a true story.

Ultimately, what that leads to is customers who can and do trust you.