In this video, John and I discuss a recent marketing meltdown in the aviation industry. It’s important to show your company, product or service in the best possible light, but it’s even MORE important to be scrupulously honest, especially with verifiable facts. Credibility is hard to come by, and even harder to get back if you’ve compromised it. We talk about what went wrong in the case study we observed, and how to do marketing and personal branding the right way.

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Welcome to Marketing Monday. I’m Paula Williams. And I’m John Williams. And we are ABCI and ABCI’s mission is to help all you folks out there in the aviation world sell more products and services. Absolutely. So today we’re going to be talking about exaggeration in sales and personal branding, which is a subject that has been in movies and social media and a lot of places in the last week, so we thought it was very timely to talk about.

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Implications and implications thereof.

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What can possibly go wrong and how to avoid it. So, thanks for joining us. So, here’s what happened as far as the social media side of this goes. There’s a fairly well-known artist that’s been on the air show circuit doing great art and has had a fairly successful career in a lot of different places.

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You may know Sherry Boggs or the 48th Maintenance Company. And it was a really fairly successful scenario. She had quite a bit of social media following and things like that. And I assume she was selling lots of materials and things.

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Stuff.

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Stuff, and everything was great. This is the sort of thing that we hate to see because somebody has a business that’s running along fairly smoothly and they don’t need to exaggerate. She had a lot of successful things going on, a lot of great work that people liked. A lot of people already liked her work on social media. I’m assuming that she had a pretty good business going at the air shows and things like that.

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I’ve never personally run into her. No. But what happened to her is something that could happen to anybody who is kind of unguarded and maybe a little exaggerating on social media and elsewhere. And a lot of these things people could get away with for a number of years because it’s kind of a tradition in aviation that people do what they call hanger flying

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and it’s just between two people and it doesn’t go any further. But nowadays, anything that you say can be checked out within seconds, right?

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Yeah, I mean, if you exaggerate and then catch it and back it out soon, whatever that means, then you’re okay. Exactly, exactly.

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It’s a very forgiving audience, it seems, but there are some things that they are not so forgiving of, right? And one of these was when talking with people on Facebook, a lot of people kind of come under the impression that they’re talking to one person, right?

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Not so.

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Right.

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You get into the rhythm of having a conversation with someone and you just say things and things like that. In this case, this person said some things that somebody decided to check out. In this case, giving some fairly specific details about where she got training, where she flew specific aircraft and other kinds of things and it turned out to be a little more than was absolutely true.

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Right? Or at least verifiably true, we’ll put it that way.

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Any of those of us in the military that have been through undergraduate pilot training, either for helicopters, jets, or the new stuff, it’s very obvious.

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Right, exactly. So, you know, by putting some of these details out there, you need to make sure that when you do mention things, and we do recommend that people get fairly specific with things that are true, but if they’re not verifiable facts, people get kind of cranky about those kinds of things, right?

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Yeah, well, they should.

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Yeah, and particularly about military service and other kinds of things. And in some cases, if you use photographs, you want to make sure that they are original photographs because people can see, you know, somebody looked this up on Facebook and said it took me exactly five seconds

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to find the image that you stole and photoshopped. And it’s fairly obvious because of the placement of the background and other kinds of things, it is not easy to get away with a Photoshop even if you are a professional, right? Exactly. Okay. So three days later, talking about this story, what’s the damage, right?

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Facebook page is gone. Company page has been removed after getting about 40 plus bad one-star reviews. You know, five stars is great, one star is bad. Pages since been deleted. There are a bunch of Yelp reviews that can’t be deleted and those, the record forever, basically. Right. Okay. We have one of our members brought this to our attention and said, clearly this woman had a great following of veterans and people in

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the air shows. The problem is, basically within this community, there’s only so many women who have flown F-16s and they all know each other, right? Or at least know about each other.

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It’s a very selective club, I’d say.

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It is, exactly. And you know, only so many people who have flown F-16s and they all know each other. And it’s a larger club. Exactly. But this isn’t really something I think that was intentional or malicious or anything else or anybody trying to take anything away from anybody else.

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And in this country we have a fairly long tradition of tall tales and fish stories, right? You’ve all heard about Paul Bunyan, right? Of course. And his big blue ox, Bade, right? And these kinds of things are often harmless.

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And I think even in the aviation community, sometimes you’re sitting next to somebody and they start telling you something. I saw, I actually had an older gentleman tell me at an air show, I saw Chuck Yeager break the speed record at an air show. I was thinking, well, that’s kind of unlikely because you can’t really see somebody break the speed record.

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It’s not likely something that he would do at an air show. It’s not like I’m going to confront the guy and get irritated and things like that because people do get details mixed up and we don’t jump all over them. That’s the way it is, right?

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Human beings are like that.

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Human beings are like that. Fish stories, right? My grandfather used to tell me that tomato worms came from outer space, you know? And, you know, I mean, it’s just a thing that we do. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, it’s all,

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what is the word, technically deception, but it’s not meant in a horrible way, right? Right, but it’s also not having to do

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with business, in those cases.

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That’s true. Here’s someone who meant it in terms of business. The Greatest Showman was a fairly big movie that opened a couple of weeks ago about P.T. Barnum, who actually made a living and his entire business was based on things that were questionably verifiable. right? And a lot of the things that he did, the bearded lady, the 95-foot crocodile, other

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kinds of things, were clearly exaggerations, were clearly manufactured or exaggerated. But was that a terrible thing? In his case, probably not, because it was in service of entertainment, you know, but you can argue that all day long. You know, all I’m saying is if you are doing sales or marketing, you really do need to be verifiable on all of your facts, right? Yes. Okay.

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So, I did one, right? On my, yes, on my LinkedIn profile I have certifications, project management professional from And it expired. Don’t tell anybody, right?

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Not now.

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No.

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I went back and I redid all of the records and I filled out all the forms and I paid my back dues and did all of those things. But I only renewed it every two years and it had expired for about a week. And if anybody had gone to my LinkedIn profile

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and seen that it had expired, I’d be in deep doo-doo and it may have impaired people’s perception of my credibility if that had been expired and somebody looked it up at that time, right?

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True.

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So, you know, once again, we all make mistakes, but if you do, make sure you go back and fix it. Don’t have anything on, and I know John’s just dying here because he didn’t know I was going to reveal this about my faux pas. But I think it’s important that we know that it’s very likely that it happens to pretty much anybody.

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But as long as you are very clear about, especially certifications, training that you’ve had, things that you’ve done, accomplishments that you’ve made, and so on, and make sure that those are all up-to-date, verifiable, and if somebody goes to PMI to look that up, they’re going to see a current certification, right? Yes. Okay. All right. So this is how you do it right. This is a profile from Lori White,

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who is known as the luxury guru. She does a lot of marketing in the high net worth and ultra high net worth markets. And this was actually in Forbes magazine. I think this is actually pretty well done. I think this is a really nice headline. Anybody could do this, you know, what people don’t know about John F. Williams, aviation consultant, right? You could do that. I suppose I could. Yeah. She’s got a professional photograph. There is nothing falsified or fake about this, as far as we know.

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I wouldn’t know. I’ve not seen her that I know of. Exactly. But still, you know, there’s nothing wrong with looking your best, and there’s nothing wrong with making the best possible first impression, as long as it’s true. The other thing is she talks mostly about her customers, who are royals and billionaires. She’s not talking about herself. These are verifiable facts, or not specific enough to be verifiable, which is also another way of handling things. If you don’t have a lot of experience and things like that, you can frame things in a way that puts things in

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the best possible light without being deceptive. So you crossed out that line, was that… No, I’m underlining. Oh, it’s okay. So the software screwed up. Exactly. So, you know, the other side is about, you know, my… My unique niche is matching the world’s wealthiest demographics. That’s about her customers, not necessarily about herself. Talking about what you do, not necessarily about what you have done in the past, that’s

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That’s another good way to frame it in a positive way and frame it in a forward-looking way. Another thing that we like to see are real, authentic photos. They don’t have to be perfect as long as they’re authentic. In fact, authentic is better than perfect. This is Brian Chase and his family. I think this is a really good one that shows personality and a really great, colorful piece

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there. This photo is from SSC, Special Services Corporation, showing

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things in action, things being done. It’s not a perfectly lighted photo. It’s a very nice photo. It was just taken off the cuff when the guy didn’t know it. Exactly. And that shows authenticity and that you really do what you say you do, right? Showing is better than telling. This is Shane Bauman. He’s our Silicon Valley startup incubator guy doing what he does, which is pitching.

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He’s probably the world’s best pitch person, as far as I know, channeling Steve Jobs there. That’s a very good one. This is Ben A. Wilson reporting on a very unique aviation event. This was the 747 Max’s flight to Hawaii. So she got a really nice photo there with the folks involved and shows that she was definitely on the scene. And she always is. That’s what she does.

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So showing people doing their thing I think is a really good thing. This last one is John and I with Penn Jillette. We were at an event where he was speaking about marketing. He actually is one of the really great marketing strategists of our time, addition to being a magician, right?

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Magician.

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Magician.

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Magician, I said magician. So, that was a really great event and my hair was all over the place, but I still used the photo because the subject was more important than the substance, right? Sure.

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Or the composition of the photo. Not the best lighting, not the best hair, but we’ll go with it. So I think that’s one of the things that people get too hung up on. If you’re in business, what you are doing is enough if you frame it in a way that people want to do business with you, right? True.

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Okay. So another thing you can do is what we call the race car graphic. I like this for building credibility because it shows all of the places that you’ve been published or that you are a member of. But once again, you have to make sure that this is absolutely positively verifiable. So every one of these things is absolutely positively verifiable.

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And if somebody looked us up on any one of those things or asked us about any of these things, I could provide more information to back that up. Of course. All right. So, yeah, very important to – you don’t have to tell people everything in your first impression, warts and all, right? But you do want to make sure that you are being credible with the information that you do share

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in your sales and marketing. Of course.

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Right? Yes.

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Okay. All right. So this week we are launching our aviation sales training course, our aviation sales basics, which is the module one of that course. And so this is the first week that anybody, anybody anywhere on the planet can register for this. So, you know, we really look forward to seeing you there, AviationSalesTraining.com, and it’s really designed for people in aviation.

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Well, that was a little exaggeration, because I’ve already registered for it.

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Oh, that’s true, but you test registered for it. Good point. He was our beta customer for that. But still, this is the first week that any of the rest of you people who are not John Williams can register for this course.

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And it’s really designed for aviation people who may not have as much experience or training in sales as they would like. And to provide very specific training and things that we wish we had known when we started doing sales in the aviation industry. So it’s a very concentrated course. It’s going to be about 11 units.

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Each unit is going to have a video, like this one, followed by an activity like a quiz or something that you need to do in order to complete that unit. So it’s very interactive and very intensive, but it’s going to take about 11 hours to complete the entire session. You can do that in a month, you can do that in three months, you can take your time, you can do whatever you like with that. But we’re hoping that you’ll sign up for that and tell us what you think as you’re going through

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it because once again, this is brand new and we are looking for opinions from people as they go through it.

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True. True.

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Right? All right. So thank you for joining us. We enjoyed talking with you as always and we’ll see you again next Monday.