Seth's Blog : Fiblets

Fiblets

Organizations lie all the time. Big lies, sometimes, but usually small ones.

Is the call volume actually unusually heavy? Did a chef really prepare this meal just for me?

These fiblets are so common that they become part of the culture, a trope that lets the user know that this is a real organization–the same way that certain kinds of logos are trendy, these lies show that the organization is part of a particular genre. (Have you ever noticed how many INSURANCE COMPANIES WRITE SOME OF THEIR RULES IN ALL CAPS? It’s because that’s what big insurance companies do).

The insurgent marketer, then, has two practical choices:

You can easily show that you’re not of this group by relentlessly telling the truth to your customers. “We know that this phone tree is inconvenient, but it saves our operators time and so it saves us money.” Or, “The boss doesn’t want you to walk around the service bay, it has nothing to do with insurance regulations.”
You can sniff out the fiblets your competitors use and use them as well, creating the meta fib that you’re as big and heartless a bureaucracy as they are.

As consumers, it definitely doesn’t pay to call out the fiblets when talking to hard-working frontline employees. They’ve got it tough enough already.