Truth is cheap. Until it costs you something.

Everyone wants to own the word truth right now.

That’s exactly why it’s worth so little.

Too much truth in circulation

Think about what happens when a country prints too much money. Every note is worth a bit less, until nobody trusts the currency at all.

Truth has had the same treatment.

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” its word of the year. In 2022, Donald Trump launched a social network called Truth Social. Politicians across the spectrum promise to level with voters, then accuse the other side of doing the opposite.

Wellness culture told us all to speak our truth. Brands printed radical transparency on the side of smoothie bottles.

I’m not here to referee any of that. Every side has a case, and every side has used the word.

But look at what all those uses have in common. Truth gets claimed, stamped on something, worn like a badge.

And a claim costs nothing to make.

The truth that costs you

My first career was journalism. The stories that mattered never came from people announcing they were about to tell the truth. They came from people who had something to lose by saying it.

That’s the test I still use today, almost 20 years later.  A truth worth believing usually costs someone something.

Brands work the same way.

In the 1960s, Avis told the world it was only number two in car rental. “We try harder” works because the company gave away the top spot in public.

In 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page ad telling people not to buy its jacket. It spent its own sales pitch to prove what it stood for.

Both brands paid for their honesty up front. And people remembered.

Turn it up by turning things down

Most brands want the truth for free. They want to be premium and affordable, for everyone and exclusive. So they say a bit of everything, and nobody hears any of it.

Bear with me while I use the metaphor of a mixing desk: push every fader to the top and you get noise. The track only comes alive when someone decides which channel matters most, and pulls the others back.

That’s the real work behind our new idea. TURN UP YOUR TRUTH.

HOW+HOW is a brand and digital studio in London and Los Angeles that tells your truth at full volume. We zero in on the one thing only your brand can claim, then dial it up until it’s impossible to ignore. 

Zeroing in sounds tidy. In practice it means deciding which customers you’re happy to lose, which claim a competitor makes better, and which part of your story you love but has to go.

That’s where the volume comes from.

So, what will yours cost?

We won’t win this word back by shouting it louder than everyone else. Plenty of people are already doing that.

We win it back by making truth valuable again. By choosing the specific thing over the safe thing, and living with what you leave out.

So here’s the first question we’ll ask you.

What would your brand have to give up to tell the truth?

Answer that, and we’ll turn it up.

—
Cat How is Founder & ECD at HOW+HOW