The trust problem with marketing claims

Everett: Yes, completely. At LifeLock, we had solid research behind "one in four people experience identity theft" – it was simple, clear, and believable, so we put it on our homepage and didn't look back. What we hadn't done was check how people were actually processing it. It took a third-party audit to find out that a meaningful number of consumers looked at that stat and thought, "one in four? That's not me – I'll be the three out of four." So instead of creating urgency, it did the opposite.

Everett: If a claim scores 75% unique and 85% believable, the question is: compared to what? It could be a genuinely strong claim, or simply the best of a bunch of mediocre ones. Where possible, I'll add in existing claims, competitor claims, or category norms, so there's something to measure against. I'd also test the claim on its own merit first – take the brand out of it entirely – then bring back the diagnostics on brand fit and differentiation. A score tells you how you performed. Context tells you whether it matters.

Everett: I've definitely seen that happen. A lot of companies fall into the trap of stacking claims – an email that says 90% agreed with this, 92% said that, 89% agreed with something else. Individually, each stat might carry weight, but put three together and you've created three independent, competing reasons rather than one strong one. One plus one plus one doesn't equal three, it just equals noise. I always say less is more – a single, focused claim beats a wall of stats and footnotes every time.