I am a marketing guy. I should know better. I know that what the public sees on the outside is only what a company wants you to see. But recently this concept really hit me at home on a very personal level.

The concept of outside perception and inside reality is the fact that the perception the outside world has about your company or product is something that you should and can control. In a perfect world, what you want to accomplish is symmetry between these two realities. The perception that your customer has of your company via your advertising or marketing efforts should match the experience that the customer will have when they actually do business with you. As you well know that is not always the case. To the extreme, it can even be fraudulent and called “false advertisement”.

Well anyway, lately I have been in a kind of somber mood. Watching too much CNN and MSNBC with their daily testimony of gloom and doom and of our inevitable erasure of life as we know it in these here United States of America. The more you listen to the news, the more you start believing what they have to say, and even though your personal daily reality does not necessarily reflect the chaos they are reporting, it gets to you and it can really hamper your progress and activity levels. At least that was the case with me, I became almost defeatist in my attitude.

So here I was, just pondering the current situation and somehow started thinking about all the alternative paths I could have taken in this life, and if those paths would have led me to a more secure place today. I started thinking about various jobs that I have held, and the circumstances under which I chose to leave, and if it was all worth it or not. In one of these, I reached over and visited one of my old employer’s websites. I was particularly interested because it has been 4 years or so since I left and I created the website. I wanted to see what if any changes they had made to my original design.

When I got there, I realized they had completely swapped out my design for a popular template design I have seen before. That’s O.K. That is their right. Then I realized that they added a video widget to the site, which I thought was a great idea. Video is hot right now and I think is a permanent part of all future marketing efforts. But when I saw the video….

I must say the video was impressive. It had a great music bed, fast moving graphics and it showed many of my old co-workers and customers interacting having a great old time. I felt a little left out. If I felt a little doubtful about my past choices, watching this video almost guaranteed I would go into a major depression. How stupid could I have been to blow this wonderful opportunity with this fun and energetic company? Everyone was having a blast and here I am on the outside looking in now, feeling sorry for myself. You blew it buddy, talk about bad judgment. I almost wanted to pick up the phone and beg for my old job back. There was only one problem with all of this…

It was all a load of BULL!!! None of the images in this video were accurate as to the experience at this company. When I really sit down to reminisce about my 2 years at this company, I am quickly reminded about how I hated getting up every day to go to work at this place. Every day from 8AM to 6PM felt like a jail sentence. The minutes just ticked away each day as I waited to get out of this cubicle to be able to breathe. The ½ hour lunch was not enough. We dealt with the most deadpan, listless, and apathetic client base I have ever worked with. (Membership based) The owner was an ego maniac that sucked up all the air and did not let us have an independent thought, lest it harm his fragile ego. The environment was conducive to turning the sweetest people into rats, within a month of working there, bickering, backstabbing and gossiping to no end. The pay rather than growing with time actually shrank with time as the owner, campaigned for company support by making staff take ever growing pay cuts. We felt compelled to cooperate, otherwise be listed for being fired for lack of team spirit.
Yet to look at this video, you would think it is the #1 of the Best Companies to work for on the Forbes 500.

I guess as a Marketer, I would have to say that the video was a success as a promotional tool if it at least for a brief moment fooled a former insider. But knowing the attrition rate that this company has with staff and with customers, I can only say people quickly come to the truth.

I guess Seth Godin was right “All Marketers are Liars.”