Lessons from competitive analysis

Ways that sellers shade the truth

I spent about ten years doing competitive analysis for a technology company, and I was pretty good at it. That’s not my job anymore, but I notice myself using those skills almost unconsciously as I look at political campaigns – which is not all that surprising, since in some ways a political campaign is a form of competitive selling. At the same time, it’s striking how different today’s political competition is from what happens in selling enterprise IT.

One important dimension is distinguishing degrees of truth. Everyone is familiar with lying, and everyone knows about white lies or rationalizations in personal life. What’s perhaps not as well-known is the way one can categorize these practices when they’re happening in service of a larger cause (a company or a campaign), and how that affects the goal of countering the competitor’s argument.

Let’s assume that X is the product or candidate. From the audience perspective, we can distinguish a few different ways in which advocates may present information about X.

The truth

One category, both easy to understand and vanishingly rare, is for advocates to simply tell the truth about X. This approach is only attractive when the truth favors X – there are some readily-described, objective factors that make X the best choice. Notice that even in this rare situation, advocates will not usually meet the legal standard for “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Advocates will still omit true but negative information that they judge to be irrelevant to the situation. That can be a problem, because it’s likely that the audience hasn’t communicated every relevant concern. But there’s no intent to deceive. This approach is incredibly powerful and persuasive, particularly when the advocate acknowledges minor flaws that are relevant to the audience.

Weirdly, the rarity of this situation means that advocates are often unequipped to pursue this strategy, even when it’s workable. Especially in sales and marketing organizations, the habits of exaggeration and spin sometimes become so ingrained that advocates use them even when they’re not needed. (I have written previously about good vs. evil marketing).

Strictly true

Another category, usually the most common, is for advocates to offer “nothing but the truth.” This is different from “truth” because it consists of selecting true statements that create a misleading impression. One common example is to say that X has both feature Y and feature Z, while omitting that the two features are mutually exclusive. The audience infers “both Y and Z simultaneously,” rather than “a single choice of either Y or Z,” which would be the correct summary. 

Another common strategy is to let the audience infer a connection that is not present. For example, one can talk about X having “integrated features,” then describe Y, then describe Z. X does have integrated features, but the integration is not between Y and Z. However, the audience tends to be generous and assume that the advocate’s description is meaningful even in ways that are not strictly present in what’s said or written. I call this kind of inference by the audience “integration by adjacency.” It’s remarkably powerful to simply put two unrelated points next to each other. If the audience is unfamiliar with X, or is familiar but well-disposed toward X, they will effectively contribute to the advocacy themselves by inferring a connection where strictly speaking there is none. An audience tends not to assume that an advocate is engaged in non sequiturs, unless the audience is both somewhat  familiar with X and skeptical of the advocate.

The strictly-true is hard to counter, because it requires the debunker to be knowledgeable enough to distinguish accurately between what’s true and what’s untrue. The debunker must also be articulate enough to explain the distinctions to the audience. A common lazy way of trying to debunk a strictly-true advocacy is to rebut the misleading impression, asserting that it’s false (which it is). Without an excellent knowledge of the truth/falsehood boundary, such a rebuttal almost always overshoots and also claims that one of the strictly-true statements is false. Then it’s easy for the original advocates to point to this error and claim that the whole debunking is erroneous.

Plausible lies

The next category consists of plausible lies, which are in some ways the mirror image of strict truth. In strict truth, all statements are individually true, but they seem to imply something that isn’t true. A plausible lie is individually false, but appears in the vicinity of true statements, and is structurally similar to those true statements.

Plausible lies can be part of an intentional strategy. However, in my experience, they usually reflect some kind of organizational breakdown or lack of knowledge. Strict truth is hard: it’s not easy to construct claims that are each individually true, but combine to imply something false. Success at that approach requires a real command of the material, and any breakdown of that command tends to produce plausible lies instead.

For example, a person may have been tasked with advocacy but doesn’t really understand the issues. A couple of times, I saw a strictly-true presentation from a competitor later show up in a revised form that had become plausible lies. I’m pretty sure that whenever such a transformation happened, there had been a well-meaning but clueless intervention in the competitor’s organization. The plausible-lies version was a much more straightforward, punchier version of the strictly-true version. The trouble, of course, was that whoever “improved” the strictly-true version by shortening sentences and removing qualifiers also falsified it. Whereas the strictly-true version was carefully picking its way through a minefield of lies, the “improved” version just barrelled its way straight through them. The new version was “better” in terms of making direct and powerful statements, but it was also clearly wrong.

It’s relatively easy to debunk plausible lies by simply starting with the items that are not true. From there it’s possible to move on to the items that are strictly true but leave a misleading impression, because the overall climate of deception has been established. Any items that are strictly-true will be judged by the audience in light of any definitely-false items, not the other way around. This asymmetry of judgment is why it’s crucial to have solid claims in competitive materials. Even a single false item included to “make the story better” will offer a good competitive analyst the foothold needed to demolish the rest of it.

The one exception to that constraint is if one is pursuing an approach of outright lying, which we’ll consider next.

Outright lies

All the previous styles assume that both sides are playing a game in which they are saying partial truths, playing with the boundary of truth vs. falsehood to gain an advantage with the audience without outright lying. However, sometimes an advocate is indifferent to truth, or even internal logical consistency. This is relatively uncommon in technology, but seems to be pretty common in politics. Since decision-making has a substantial emotional component, this approach ignores shadings of truth and simply finds messages that hit emotional buttons. There’s nothing subtle about it.

To approach this kind of messaging in terms of fact checking, debunking, or analyzing shades of truth is to miss the point. Instead, the challenge is one of framing and psychology: a successful lie in this style is likely taking advantage of the intended audience’s assumptions and biases, and probably also tapping into some kind of emotional need.

People mostly don’t do this when they’re buying or selling enterprise IT (although I have been in a surprising number of sales meetings that have a flavor of dealing with a customer’s psychological problems). In politics, people have probably always done this kind of outright lying to push emotional buttons, but it seems to have become more common recently. Increasingly, there is no set of shared agreed facts between opposing sides: every single event is interpreted within a political framing. Debunking is all but impossible in this situation, since it depends on exposing contradictions between a competitor’s claim and some verifiable aspect of reality. Instead of rebutting a claim or identifying its gaps, one must instead invest substantial time in building some shared reality – a task that often fails because the audience prefers their “bubble,” and is unwilling to invest in finding a common set of facts.