In 1960, a New York advertising agency took a photograph of a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle and printed a single word underneath it: “Lemon.”
It remains one of the most admired adverts ever made, and for years people assumed it was a stroke of reckless honesty – a car company calling its own product a dud. But the small print explained that this particular Beetle would never reach a showroom, because an inspector had spotted a blemish on the glovebox chrome and pulled it from the line. Far from an admission of failure, this was a demonstration of standards.
That advert showed that a well-placed flaw is more persuasive than a flawless pitch.
“It tastes awful. And it works.”
Around the same time, Avis was a distant second in American car hire, and rather than pretend otherwise, it ran the line “We’re only No.2. We try harder.” Conceding the weakness was the argument: if we’re not the biggest, we have to work harder for your business, and you, the customer, are the one who benefits.
Buckley’s, the Canadian cough mixture, took it further still. Its mid-1980s campaign was built on exactly two claims: the stuff tastes revolting, and it works. The slogan – “It tastes awful. And it works.” – lifted its share of the cough-and-cold market by more than ten per cent. The horrible taste did the credibility work, because nobody makes their medicine taste like that unless they’re serious about the second half of the sentence.
And in case you think this is all dusty mid-century stuff, consider Domino’s. In 2010 the company went on television and effectively admitted its pizza had been tasting like cardboard, but then it said it had fixed the recipe. Sales jumped 14.3% in a single quarter.
The mechanism is identical every time: admit the weakness, and the strength becomes credible.
The science of the flaw
This isn’t just a collection of interesting anecdotes; the psychology behind it is unusually well evidenced.
A major analysis of “two-sided advertising” (the posh term for adverts that admit a downside) found that a little volunteered bad news genuinely lifts how people feel about a brand. But beware: the research found it helpful up to a point, then sharply counterproductive. A pinch of candour builds trust, but a bucketful just makes you sound like you’re going under.
Then there’s the “blemishing effect”. Under the right conditions, adding one small negative to an otherwise positive description makes people warmer towards the product, not cooler – strongest when the negative comes after the positives, and when people aren’t reading too forensically. The single flaw makes everything around it ring true, and it’s why a 4.9-star rating on Google trumps a 5-star rating.
The grandparent of all this is the pratfall effect. A highly competent person becomes more likeable after a human blunder. But beware once more: a mediocre person who does the same thing just look… like a prat. Which gives us the three conditions candour needs in order to work: you have to look competent already, the flaw has to be limited rather than fatal, and the disclosure has to look voluntary rather than dragged out of you.
Hold those three conditions in mind, because one estate agent met all of them about forty years before the academics caught up.
Britain’s rudest estate agent
Roy Brooks sold houses in Chelsea and Pimlico from a chaotic little office in South Kensington, and he did it by writing the most insulting property ads Britain had ever seen. A derelict Pimlico house became “this erstwhile house of ill-repute… it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof.” A box of a study was “a library all of eight feet square, suitable for erudite dwarf.” A basement with a pest problem had “gaping holes… not done by rats, but merely large mice.”
He should, by every conventional rule, have gone out of business. Instead his trade tripled almost overnight and the firm ended up turning sellers away. People who had no intention of buying read his column over breakfast for the sport of it. And Brooks knew exactly why it worked. “There have been so many lies about housing,” he said, “that if you simply tell the truth you get a disproportionate response.” Or, more bluntly: “We find it pays to disclose the worst. We are still selling houses faster than we can get them.”
Look closely and he ticks every box the research demands. He was plainly competent – the man understood the London market better than anyone. The flaws he named were limited, and always carried an upside: name the rot, then mention that a tarted-up version of this dump four doors down just went for three times the price. And the disclosure was gloriously, theatrically voluntary. He wasn’t forced to call a house filthy. He volunteered it, and the volunteering was the proof you could believe the rest.
The trust deficit nobody’s filling
Here’s why this should interest you and not just amuse you.
Estate agents are not a trusted profession. Ipsos’s long-running Veracity Index had trust in agents at 30% in 2018, climbing to 37% in 2024, then slipping back to 32% in 2025. A 2026 mover survey found only 51% trust their agent to act in their best interests. Recovering from a low base, in other words, rather than anywhere near safe.
Now look at what’s actually in the listings. A 2025 HomeOwners Alliance audit of leasehold properties across the major portals found that while almost all stated the tenure, only 62% mentioned the service charge, 49% gave ground-rent detail, and a remarkable 9% bothered to state the next ground-rent review date.
When the consumer expects evasiveness, plain truth doesn’t read as weakness. The same research consistently shows buyers begging for it: in one 2026 survey, 91% wanted a simple, easy-to-understand process and 89% wanted better communication. They are telling you what they want, and almost nobody is supplying it.
How to bank the premium
So name the road noise. Mention the short lease before the survey does. Say the second bedroom is small but fine as a nursery or a home office, rather than reaching for “versatile accommodation”. Flag the higher-than-average service charge and explain it, instead of leaving the buyer to discover it and assume the worst.
But remember – candour works in pinches, not buckets. Done properly you get better-qualified enquiries, fewer fall-throughs, and a vendor who can see that you’re the kind of agent who tells the truth.
Everyone in your market is selling the same dream in the same forty adjectives. The premium isn’t in polishing those adjectives one more time, but being the agent who sounds like they’d tell you if the boiler was on its way out.
Toby Martin is an industry marketer, consultant, trainer, and speaker.
Read the orginal article: https://propertyindustryeye.com/the-candour-premium-britains-rudest-estate-agent-proves-honesty-pays/
