I’d love to see more candour in content across regulated spaces, but especially in video given the medium lends itself to it.

We’ve all seen and grown tired of the heavily airbrushed ‘talking head’ case study, 3 minutes in length and painting a rosy picture of onboarding and results. Viewers learn little and the slick veneer of the message means it carries little transformational potential.

But what if we were to change that by voluntarily giving voice to any issues, concerns and problems that people encounter with our product or service?

Firstly, in the spirit of providing Value to the Viewer First (before expecting any benefit to ourselves), we’d be providing a more compelling reason for people to watch case studies and sales-based video content in the first place. A 3-minute educational video, rather than a vanity piece, keeps the viewer watching.

It would lend much more weight to the good stuff. Much like a claim made publicly is much more valuable than one made privately, a claim is credible in proportion to what it costs the speaker to make it. Candour and transparency can be painful for the discloser, but if you can convince your audience you’re okay to say the difficult or awkward stuff, they are more likely to implicitly trust you on everything else too.

Your prospect is likely to encounter these frustrations later anyway. Just as a vaccination works by giving you a small, survivable dose of a pathogen that could otherwise cause considerable damage, exposure to negatives early builds an internal resistance to the ‘full-strength’ version later. This can be experienced personally — when the frustration finally arises — or externally, when, for example, a prospect is pre-prepared to push back on their CFO’s price objection.

But there are some caveats regarding using this approach.

The format and style of the video has to be able to carry it. Which is a way of saying it needs to feel truly authentic. If your video feels heavily scripted, voluntarily sharing concerns looks tactical.

The concession has to be earned. Aronson’s Pratfall Effect teaches us that you can become more likeable after making a mistake, but only if you were already perceived as highly competent. The video can’t go straight into admissions, or this will backfire.

Don’t go looking for problems. Only raise concerns that prospects already have, or are likely to, rather than introducing them to new ones.

Manufacturing it into a positive is much worse than not doing it at all. Don’t be that person in a job interview whose weakness is “caring too much.”

And finally, don’t fully resolve it. A concern raised and rectified looks like a setup, a show of false modesty. Talk about the problem, and how you’ve tried to rectify it, but accept you, and your product or service, are not perfect.