Three lessons from Paul Greenberg's Social CRM Summit

Paul Greenberg’s inaugural Social CRM summit earlier this year was severely disrupted by a snow storm. It was volcanic ash and a BA cabin crew strike that threatened to disrupt my visit to the second summit, held at Kennesaw State University, in balmy Georgia.

The event was something of a gathering of minds in the SCRM space with distinguished thinkers like Paul Greenberg, Dr Jeff Tanner &  Jeff Pedowitz  presenting and thought leaders like Esteban Kolsky, Marshall Lager,  and Jacob Morgan driving a lively discussion and tweeting live from the event. It was a uniquely social event with an extended audience following the #SCRMsummit hashtag on Twitter.

Two of my fellow participants have already published excellent posts on the event. Lauren Hall-Stigerts wrote a comprehensive summary of the event here and Jacob Morgan covered the more social side of the event here! I don’t aim to repeat anything they have already written. Instead I wanted to focus on 3 key learnings I look away from the summit.

1. CRM remains the foundation of Social CRM

Although the summit focussed on the “S” in SCRM; Paul emphasised a number of times that CRM does not disappear. Companies still need to answer phones, take orders, handle complaints etc... SCRM does not replace CRM, it compliments CRM. In some ways it represents the final missing piece of the CRM puzzle. The piece that acknowledges the customer’s control of the conversation; the piece that encourages listening and responding to the direct and authentic voice of the customer (and the customer’s community); and the piece that forces companies to embrace outside-in thinking and not simply focus on internal command and control mechanisms. Many SCRM vendors and practitioners still have some way to go in articulating a strong CRM integration story, but the 2 must be treated as one.

2. Embracing Social Media does not mean you have embraced Social CRM

Setting up a Facebook fan page or Tweeting special offers to your customers is easy, but let’s be clear; that does not mean you have embraced Social CRM, you have merely adopted some new channels. Adopting social channels without a wider framework can be dangerous. Social media can give marketers more data than they ever dreamed of; the danger of which is that inside-out thinking is perpetuated and increasingly granular customer segments are bombarded with direct messages, tweets, notifications etc.  The force has both a light and a dark side! See my post on Star Wars and Social CRM.

3. The concept of “someone (or a company) like me” is central to what drives customer trust and advocacy and LTV is no longer enough

This was an interesting idea that Paul introduced at the event. The idea of “someone like me” has been told many times. Customer’s trust advice and guidance from people they perceive to be similar to themselves, far more than they trust corporate marketing, PR or a smooth-talking salesman. “A company like me” extends this concept through the alignment of a company’s brand values to those of its customers. Customer advocacy is not just driven by successful transactions; it’s a product of an emotional connection that the customer has made to the company and its brand. Co-creation is a powerful mechanism to help establish a customer’s emotional connection, as customer’s can be made to feel part of the brand. When a customer feels part of the brand and starts acting as an advocate, traditional metrics like LTV are no longer enough; the social customer can have positive or negative value far outside their direct revenue-generating transactions. See Paul’s recent post on Measuring the Social Customer.

It was a pleasure to attend the Social CRM summit and connect with many of the friends and colleagues that I have been working with for a while. A Transcript of the Tweets from the event can be found here.

Disclaimer and disclosure: I attended the Social CRM summit as a guest of Paul Greenberg and BTP Partners but my company Capgemini paid my travel costs.

What's driving Social CRM - opportunity or fear?

Most clients that I have discussed Social CRM with so far have fallen into one of two camps: those motivated by the opportunity presented by Social CRM and those motivated by their fear of the social customer. Let me say from the outset that I recognise that this is quite a crude split, that there are grey areas in between, and that over time it's certainly possible for a client to move from one camp towards another; but for the moment let me explain my thinking.

First, a reminder that Social CRM is "the company's response to the customer's control of the conversation" (Paul Greenberg "Time to put a stake in the ground on Social CRM"). Those driven by the opportunity of Social CRM see customer control of the conversation as a positive thing as it provides knowledge, insight and engagement that they might otherwise have missed.  If we take a Consumer Goods company as an example, most have long been separated (and as a result frustrated) from their end consumers by retailers. For Consumer Goods companies Social CRM represents a unique opportunity to engage, listen, capture and respond to the direct and authentic voice of the consumer. Consumer Products companies can leverage Social CRM to build deeper relationships with the end users of their products, create new products (or re-design old ones) based on direct community feedback, adjust promotions or test new markets based on real consumer insight.

Those motivated by fear of the customer's new found control of the conversation, on the other hand, think quite differently. These are organisations whose relationship with their customers is typically defined by negative moments of truth. Take a water utility, for example. Now I have no desire to have any sort of interaction with my water utility other than when I sign up, when I leave, or if something goes wrong in between. My relationship with my water utility is defined purely by how easy it is for me to set up or close my account, the cost of my bill, how many things go wrong and how well they are dealt with. If things do go wrong (for example, if my bill is incorrect, my water pressure is low, or if sewage is pumped into my street) them my relationship with my water company is determined by how well they deal with that negative moment of truth. If my water utility can't fix the problem in a manner I deem to be appropriate, through the channel of my choice, then the chances are that I will eventually turn to social channels to vent my frustration. I will tweet, I will blog, I will write negative reviews etc. If my negative sentiment resonates with others, then it will gain viral momentum, causing embarrassment and potentially lost customers. If you think about many of the headline-grabbing Social failures like United breaks guitars, Eurostar's Twitter storm, or BT's YouTube complaint; many have been driven by an inability to spot and deal with a negative moment of truth. Hence for some organisations, their primary driver for Social CRM (at least in the first instance) is simply to be able to better listen and respond to angry customers; putting out sparks and flames before they become fires.

Currently most commentary on Social CRM is directed towards the opportunity camp. I don't dispute that, or the logic that goes with it - the opportunity camp is where the excitement happens; where organisations can become truly customer-centric / customer-driven. But the opportunity camp is not necessarily an easy starting point for all organisations; improving customer service to quench flames of discontent is far more tangible for some. Over time I suspect companies starting in either camp will evolve their thinking and usage of Social CRM. Those who start by trying to listen and respond out of fear for the social customer may find an opportunity to better understand their customers (their desired outcomes and their value creation processes). This insight in turn may lead them to spot new opportunities for product or service enhancement.

What's your view?

Measuring the ROI of Social CRM

For some reason ROI is often a dirty word when used in the context of a Social CRM initiative. Metrics are abundant but dollars are often harder to find. It’s easy to point to a metric like number of followers, page impressions, percentage of positive sentiment etc but ultimately all of these are just leading indicators. Every board room I have been in to have asked the tough questions:

•    How much is this going to cost me?
•    What cash flows will I get in return?
•    How will this enable me to achieve my strategic objectives?
•    What are the risks?
•    How does the proposed course of action compare against other (viable) alternatives that I have?

I couldn’t imagine facing off to a hard-nosed exec without having answers to these questions and responses like “we need to join the conversation” simply don’t cut the mustard. Kathy Herrmann nails this point in her presentation on “What Social Business ROI really means”:

“There are folks who seem to view social media initiatives as a special class of corporate initiative that’s exempt from Business 101 fundamentals. That astounds me, especially when you consider how the costs for social media can climb...It is unrealistic not to expect execs to demand an ROI on any major corporate initiative. Companies run on money, not on tweets or the number of friends they have.”

Twitter may be a free tool, but Social CRM has real costs: People, Process, Technology and Management. It can also create tangible benefits; increasing revenues (e.g. through word of mouth marketing, up-selling or cross-selling), or reducing operational costs (e.g. through call deflection via an online community, or reduced cost of lead acquisition). Logitech for example deflect around 120,000 cases per month from their online community. Dell famously sell around $3m per annum via Twitter (tiny in the context of their overall revenues, but nevertheless growing).  As such, why shouldn’t the Board be entitled to understand the likely cash flows from their investment? Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D. from Forrester has done a terrific job of detailing some of these costs and revenue as they relate to online communities in “The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities”. The Social CRM vendor, Lithium, has gone a step further and has built some of this thinking into their product.

The real question in my mind is not whether ROI is measurable or valid (it is), it’s whether ROI is the only metric worth evaluating? I would suggest that ROI as an isolated metric is not enough. In fact nothing like enough. All companies aim to create shareholder value (or “Stakeholder” in a public company); but each will have different methods of achieving that goal. For example a low-cost retailer might focus all its energies on growing revenue and market share during a time of economic recession. The retailer will actively hire and spend marketing budget to achieve those aims. Other companies may focus on earnings during the same climate of economic distress; consciously sacrificing risky revenue growth opportunities to concentrate on cost-saving. A decision to invest in Social CRM needs to be based on ROI but also on alignment to strategic objectives. This is a point Wim Rampen makes clearly:

“If the goal of your strategy is to double your market-share in 10 years... I would think that any investment you are doing should be aimed at meeting that strategic goal, hence any business cases should not only be measured against financial ROI, but against strategic-outcomes too”

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers take strategic thinking about customer-investments one step further with their comprehensive work on Return on Customer (ROC). They suggest that customer’s are the surest route to business growth:

“Most business executives would agree, intellectually, that customers represent the surest route to business growth – getting more customers, keeping them longer, and making them more profitable. Most understand that the customer base itself is a revenue-producing asset for their company – and that the value it throws off ultimately drives the company’s economic worth. Nevertheless, when companies measure their financial results, they rarely if ever take into account any changes in the value of this underlying asset, with the result that they are blind – and financial analysts are blind – to one of the most significant factors driving business success.”

This way of thinking balances short and long term objectives in a meaningful way and offers something complimentary to ROI:

“Return on investment quantifies how well a firm creates value from a given investment. But what quantifies how well a company creates value from its customers? For this you need the metric of Return on Customer (ROC). The ROC equation has the same form as an ROI equation. ROC

equals a firm’s current-period cash flow from its customers plus any changes in the underlying customer equity, divided by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period.”

What I like most about ROC is that it treats customers as an asset (the sum of all customer lifetime value) and it takes into account changes to the capital value of that asset, instead of simply looking at the dividends produced by the asset in the current quarter i.e. current quarterly revenues. The capital value of the customer asset is not just their transactional worth it is also their “social” worth. As my Capgemini colleague Mark Walton-Hayfield points out:

“Having reward mechanisms that are based on more than just what the customer spends with the company will become more important. Reward mechanisms need to develop to be based on the value that customers bring to the organisation through co-creation and customer advocacy as well as their attitude to the company brand. This could be based on the contributions they make to an online community or knowledge base, for example, and the additional customers the business may obtain through existing customers’ recommendations or positive comments made by an existing customer.”

On that basis therefore, whilst I would suggest that looking at the ROI of a Social CRM initiative is mandatory, I do not believe it should be looked at in isolation. A decision to invest in social CRM needs to be aligned to an organisation’s corporate objectives and needs to consider both short and long terms value drivers.

Further reading and presentation material:

A huge amount of work has been done on ROI in Social CRM. I’d recommend the following:

Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D. (Forrester) - “The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities”

Kathy Herrmann - “What Social Business ROI really means”

Mike Boysen - The ROI of CRM (and Social CRM)

Olivier Blanchard - Basics Of Social Media ROI

Don Peppers & Martha Rogers PH. D. – “Return on Customer”

This article was first published on myCustomer.com

The sports fan experience at Saracens RFC

I recently went to a rugby match - Northampton vs Saracens in the semi final of the Anglo Welsh cup. A friend of mine is Finance Director at Saracens and he invited me along. We arrived 3 hours before the game in a cold windy car park in Northampton and he told me that his CEO was passionate about creating a positive customer experience at their games. He had a vision of creating a pre-match atmosphere at English club games similar to the Southern Hemisphere, where fans turn up a couple of hours before the game creating a party atmosphere in the car parks, with meats roasting on BBQs and rival fans enjoying a pre-match drink or two as they welcome the teams into the ground. Intrigued, but somewhat bemused as the icy wind smacked across my face, I looked across a vast, empty, desolate car park next to an industrial estate and I couldn't help but question the sanity of such a vision.

We waited in the car park for around 5 minutes then I watched a Land Rover pull up about 300m away from us. The driver got out and put up 2 tall Saracens rugby club flags. As we walked closer to the Land Rover, another car arrived and set up a couple of tables with drinks and meat pies. We arrived and helped ourselves to a drink and some food. Within 10 minutes over 200 people had joined us; fans, ex-international players, current squad members (not playing through injury), junior players and back office staff. The CEO had been on Twitter and the club's web site and had publicised a pre-match Tweet-up to ensure that a large group of fans would greet the players as they arrived at this hostile away fixture. For the next 30 minutes or so, the CEO and many of his staff gave out food, drink, flags, horns and even Saracens tabards to those supporters who had made the early journey to Northampton. All of the Saracens staff mingled with fans, listened to their views and discussed the game ahead.

By now nearly 300 people were in the car park and we marched in procession to the ground to welcome the players as they arrived at the ground. The players got off the bus to find a mass of cheering supporters, mascots and a double-decker Saracens bus (set up as the mobile club shop) waiting for them. They looked amazed, and I hope, also inspired by the support.

When we got into the ground I understood why they needed that support. Northampton supporters seemed to outnumber Saracens fans by around 20 to 1. On the pitch, Saracens put up a good fight in the first half but suffered from indiscipline and in the end were soundly beaten by Northampton.

From a customer experience perspective, my interest is in the learning's that can be drawn from my day at Saracens.

1.       Customer Experience is a continuous process; not a one-off, end of season party - many organisations treat customer satisfaction as a one off event, measured annually by customer satisfaction surveys. Often they hold an annual customer party or invite key customers to an event just before the annual survey. Of course, customers don't think that way and aren't so easily bribed. They remember the basics (the late deliveries, the broken promises, the inaccurate bills), just as much as the end of season party. The customer experience is the sum of all of the individual customer interactions which typically take place across formal (organisation-owned) channels, as well as the Social Web, normally outside the organisations control.

2.       Changing customer attitudes takes time - Saracens are trying to create a new and different experience for their supporters. This is not going to be simple or easy. Customers have ingrained habits, just as much as organisations have ingrained culture or practices. Instead of trying to start with a big bang and failing, Saracen's are starting small and building their tribe. They are listening, engaging, understanding what their fans value, and over time they are winning the right to create the vision they are aiming for.

3.       A little generosity creates enormous good will - speaking to a few of the Saracen's fans, none of them expected to receive free food or drinks from the club. Let along flag or tabards. I'm sure the club won't do that at every game! However, once in a while, unexpected random acts of kindness can help make an experience memorable.

4.       The best CEOs immerse themselves with their customers and they encourage those around them to do the same - I guess it would be easy for most sports-club CEOs to spend all their time wining and dining in the corporate box with sponsors. Of course those sponsors are key customers. But the best CEOs try and understand the customer base, from top to bottom. Sure they may allocate their time towards certain customer segments, but they never lock themselves away and they expect the same from those around them whether they work in Marketing, Sales, Finance or Logistics. No one is too senior to sit in a call centre for a day and take customer calls, or shadow an account manager to speak with real customers.

I enjoyed my day with Saracens. It's great to see customer experience thinking being applied in areas you don't necessarily expect to find it.

Disclaimer and disclosure - I was a guest of Saracens for the Anglo-Welsh semi final. Saracens paid for my ticket to the game. However, I am not a Saracens supporter! I support one of their main London rivals - Harlequins. Saracens had no input whatsoever into this article which represents my personal views only.

A business framework for CRM & Social CRM

There seems to be common agreement within the Social CRM community that the time for debating definitions of Social CRM is over. Most people have accepted Paul Greenberg's stake in the ground post and have now moved on. Turning definitions into action is the next challenge.

As such, this post is work in progress. It doesn't aim to move the needle forward on the academic thinking on Social CRM, but it does reflect recent client presentations I have given on the subject, that have moved clients forward. Having got definitions out of the way, I've found that clients have responded well to this business framework for CRM and Social CRM as a tool to help them visualise the different components of CRM and SCRM, how they work together and where they should focus their attentions, before looking at tools.

The framework below is simple. It's meant to be. I've used variations of it for the last 10 years to facilitate CRM discussions between different stakeholders (e.g. business and IT) and ensure they are on the same page. Social CRM has allowed me to add in a missing layer encompassing a customer's social interactions and experiences. Let me try and explain the model layer by layer (right click and open in new tab to see a larger version).

Customer Strategy layer - This is the starting layer. Both CRM and SCRM need to be strategy-led and people / process / technology-enabled. This layer begins with the key mind-set shift from "Inside-Out" to "Outside-in". If you haven't made this step-change, do not pass go. Social CRM simply won’t work.

Customer to Customer layer - this next layer of the model starts with the customer's desired outcomes and their value creation process to achieve those outcomes. Often the first step that a customer might take in achieving their aims is to ask other customers. The customer-to customer layer refers to the social aspect of customer value creation e.g. customer's reading product reviews, contributing to forum discussions, writing blogs, joining Facebook groups etc. To paraphrase Paul Greenberg, this is the new "customer control of the conversation". See my post on "outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers" or "Customer to Customer and the legend of Kachiwachi".

Customer Experience layer - the customer experience is the sum of customer outcomes from the customer’s perspective of both social interactions and formal, company-"owned" channels.

Operational CRM Channels layer - traditional multi-channel CRM, supporting the range of company-owned channels of communication and customer interaction. CRM remains a foundation and key building-block for Social CRM.

People & Ecosystem layer - perhaps the key layer in the model. While your competitors are focussing on tools; do something different and focus on people. They probably have a bigger impact on customers than any tool you can buy. See my post on "Software doesn’t build relationships; people do"

Lean & Agile processes layer - this layer of the model relates to all customer-facing business processes. I've simplified to "marketing, sales, fulfilment and service" as that seems to capture the complete customer lifecycle. I make no distinction between company-owned processes and out-sourced processes as customers don't!

BI, Sentiment & Social Listening layer - to some extent BI is the handle that turns the wheel, driving constant measurement and refinement of the customer strategy.

The Altimeter Group have done a terrific job of putting a framework around Social CRM tools. See their paper on “The 18 use cases of Social CRM: The new rules of relationship management”. This comprehensive report and framework allows organisations to get a clear picture of tools available to enable Social CRM.

What I plan to move onto next are the other foundational enablers to the framework e.g. MDM, SOA etc, along with the delivery approaches to successful transformation e.g. Lean, Agile. See my post on “Lean thinking in CRM and SCRM”.

As stated this is very much work in progress, if you have any constructive builds I’d certainly welcome them.

Software doesn't build relationships; people do

I had a call this week with Michael Krigsman. Michael is President and CEO of Asuret, Inc.  and has chosen to specialise in a interesting niche, IT project failures. He writes a blog on the topic of IT failures for ZDNet and talks with a rare passion for a difficult subject.

One of the things on which we agreed strongly was the assertion that many of the IT failures, that at first appear to be technology related at their core, are in fact people-related. That resonated with me as although I am often quick to criticise technology-centric CRM projects, I have seen many a project where technology is an easy scapegoat for more complex people problems.

I once worked on a CRM project-turnaround where the project team all pointed the finger of blame on the software product that they were using. They pointed to bugs and things not working as they expected. After some quick analysis I found that the implementation team had no previous experience of implementing the package they had chosen, they had no sponsorship from the business, no CRM strategy and only tiny budget set aside for change management. Software was the least of their problems…

My conversation with Michael got me thinking of some previous experiences and anecdotes relating to the importance of people in CRM projects. It's a complex topic, that deserves far more attention but if you are embarking on a customer-centric transformation these are some of the people-factors you should be considering:

Skills - this refers not only to the technical skills required to operate the CRM system (in some respects, that's the easy part). Skills, also refers to the soft-skills like listening, making realistic promises, seeing things from the customers point of view, meeting deadlines, negotiating with win-win outcomes in mind. It's easy to train someone to operate a CRM system, but much harder to enable them to use it properly.

Culture - it's incredibly difficult to change culture.  I once witnessed a call centre agent using a new and recently live CRM system apologising to a customer for her "new slow system", only to see that she was finishing typing an SMS to a friend (the new software had actually loaded in a sub-second). The best tactic I have come across to changing culture is hiring the right people from the outset. I listened to a Gartner presentation by Ed Thompson recently where Ed reminded me of SouthWest Airline's recruitment policy of hiring customer service staff who smiled. Simple but effective.

Incentives - often the most ignored aspect to a CRM project. INCENTIVES DRIVE BEHAVIOUR. REPEAT. INCENTIVES DRIVE BEHAVIOUR. If you pay customer service agents solely on average call handle time they will cut off difficult calls or calls in peak periods (not always, but sometimes - believe me I've tried mystery shopper call exercises at peak times). If you measure sales reps 100% by quarterly sales revenue, then of course they will do everything they can to bring in deals before the end of each quarter, despite that sometimes damaging future business. I recently heard of a software sales rep threatening to give a customer a licence audit if they didn't sign $2m worth of new business in the current quarter… a really great tactic to generate short term revenue and ruin long term relationships.

Knowledge - people don't know what they don't know. To some extent CRM is all about knowledge; shared knowledge of the customer to ensure everyone is on the same page and in alignment. I've worked with many organisations that have split up their sales teams by product or service area, only to find the customer getting bombarded by different, often competing sales teams.

Collaboration - as a term you may love or hate "collaboration"; it's certainly an overused buzz-word, but I couldn't really care less about that. If you don't have collaboration in CRM deployments, they fail. Period. That means IT and the business need to talk, all customer facing teams need to talk, customer facing teams need to talk to enabling functions like product management, logistics, finance… CRM is often accused of breaking down silos in the front office, only to create a silo between the front and back office.

The people issues of CRM deployments are often over-looked. Thanks for Michael Krigsman for reminding me of my passion for the topic and the importance of people in preventing failure!

The Emperor’s new Social CRM clothes

"How do I look?"

"Wonderful, your majesty! Your new Social CRM coat really brings out your customer-centric side"

"Do you really think so? It was made by the tailors in Silicon Valley you know, using the very latest Fabric-as-a-Service (FaaS). The fabric is so fine it looks almost invisible"

"Incredible, your highness. You look just like the King of Zappos, or his Royal Highness, the Prince of Threadless.com"

"Excellent. What do you think my subjects will think?"

"They will marvel Sire. They have long expressed a desire for you to set up a Facebook Fan Page so that they may honour you"

Make no mistake, I am a huge advocate of Social CRM. To anyone who has worked in the CRM space for some time, it should make perfect sense. Social CRM completes CRM. It's the missing piece in the CRM puzzle that gives an organisation the potential to listen to the direct voice of the customer and use that feedback to co-create products and improve services. It allows an organisation to create a platform to facilitate and help customer to customer collaboration. If your customer's feel positive about their experiences they may chose to answer queries, recommend products and fix problems on your behalf (see my post on "Outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers").

But, to clear, there are many things that Social CRM cannot do. I'd advocate that anyone embarking on a Social CRM journey understand these before they proceed.

Social CRM cannot compensate for poor products or services

If you core offering is poor (you can't deliver products on time or your widgets routinely break down after 6 months) then Social CRM is not a band-aid that will fix those issues. In fact, more likely, your customers will use social tools against you (see my post on "Star wars and Social CRM" – focus on the dark side of the force). Social CRM can however, help you to listen, understand the issues from the perspective of your customers and then improve and respond.

Learning and improving do not automatically follow listening

Social CRM provides a platform to listen to the customer's social voice. Many organisations who start deploying Social CRM technologies, start by deploying a listening platform. The key challenge, however, is translating the learning gained from listening to customers into improving products, services, offers etc. This is as much an organisational and cultural issue as it is a technology issue.

Social CRM does not replace CRM and cannot compensate for a poor CRM foundation

Customers turning to social channels to fix a service issue, often do so as a last resort once other options have failed. In a recent post on Virgin Media, I was recently positively surprised that someone had responded to my #fail tweet, however, I would argue that my service problem shouldn't have escalated to the level where I felt I had to tweet in the first place - all traditional CRM channels had let me down.

Social CRM does not guarantee customer participation or success

I recently read Jeff Jervis's blog post post where he recited the story of a newspaper published who asked Mark Zukerberg how he could go about building his own community. Mark responded; "you can't". The point he was making was that communities already existed and the right question to ask was how they could help them do what they wanted to do. The Social CRM world is already littered with the corpses of failed social marketing campaigns, that have tried to "engage" customers and entice them to participate in their viral community campaigns before they have listened and understood what their customers really wanted  (see example from UCC Coffee in Japan).

It's easy to get caught up with the hype of any technology. Most technology buyers end up buying far more functionality than they really need to solve the business problem that prompted them to begin evaluating technology in the first place. Whilst I am very bullish on the potential of Social CRM and constantly enthused by good examples of Social CRM in action, I think it's always worth looking in the mirror and considering with brutal honesty how your subjects (customers, employees shareholders etc) will feel about your new clothes!