“You can really tell a lot about a person by the kind of….”

Nearly everybody I know has an answer for this, such as the kind of shoes they’re wearing, the kind of car they drive, or their e-mail address. The last one is especially true; you don’t want to let your daughter date a guy whose email is sxxxy@hotmail.com (please don’t spam me).

It’s difficult to know much about people or companies until you’ve been around them for a while. A lot of us have a carefully crafted image to maintain, and we spend a lot of energy making sure that your impression of us remains favorable.

On company Web sites, they very often have an “About Us” page with an empty mission statement to do this job. My favorite ones usually say something like, “We are dedicated to serving our customers while executing strategies that provide value to our shareholders.” This kind of statement could easily describe a fast-food worker reusing a burger patty that fell on the floor.

Our cities come up with slogans and taglines to try and tell their story, such as Auburn’s, “More Than You Imagined”. I’ve been going to Auburn for almost 20 years, and I don’t do too much imagining about it, except the one time I imagined that if I locked my car door, it wouldn’t be stolen (it was).

Celebrities also work hard at telling you a good story about themselves, even when they fail. Take Tiger Woods for example. This past week, salacious details of his private life overshadowed the news of 30,000 more troops headed to Afghanistan. Tiger’s affair with another woman became public, and his image crafters responded with, “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.”

Tiger reportedly transgressed with her about 20 times over the past couple of years, and may have transgressed a New York City socialite too. His wife seems pretty mad about it, and will probably leave Tiger to transgress with himself for a while.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on him. Can you imagine what life would be like if we were completely sincere about ourselves?

You probably wouldn’t buy from a company whose stated mission is to “Extract the maximum profit out of a customer, while providing the lowest level of service we can get away with.” But we shop at these places every day.

You probably wouldn’t want to live in a city that declares it has “Moderately high tax rates with few community programs and heavy rush hour traffic”, but we don’t often notice that until after we’ve moved in. So, sometimes we’re stuck in that house until we can get that realtor to put some lipstick on our pig.

The overly wordy and romantic marketing language is starting to lose its effectiveness, though. There are thousands of products that claim to be “perfect for” your home décor, family dinner, holiday gift, or whatever. They can’t all be perfect, and we all believe it just a little bit less every time the lady on the radio says that.

Shockingly honest and sincere presentations will be the next major shift in how companies present themselves. The Internet is a game changer, and has introduced accountability for those groups making empty claims about their image and their effectiveness. Any idiot with a computer (like me) can get online and knock that down pretty quickly.

When the image doesn’t match the reality, there will eventually be an “ah-HA!” moment that makes the image-crafter look stupid. If Tiger Woods had always maintained a playboy image (and not been married), his transgressions wouldn’t be news. Nobody seems to care when Hugh Hefner gets a new girlfriend or three.

Keep the idiots away. Try a little sincerity today.