• February 21

Is Hype Dead?

There was a time that the surest way to sell to the masses was to hype the heck out of your product; to say every possible (and a few impossible) good thing about what you were selling in order to pry money from your prospect and to position it as God’s own shampoo.

But what about today? What about 2006? What about selling to a buying public who, quite frankly, is suffering from Hype Fatigue?

In my opinion (and why the heck are you here if you don’t want my opinion) marketers who are hype dependent today are shooting themselves in the foot. Can they make a sale once? Sure. Maybe. If they do it right and sell to an easily manipulated audience. But hype is a dangerous thing: if you don’t live up to it, people notice. And once they notice that your shampoo does not, as advertised, give your hair an angelic sheen, improve your sex life and infuse your scalp with a pleasant vibrating sensation, well, you can count the odds of that customer coming back to you again on 0 fingers.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to SELL your product, just that there’s a difference between selling and hyping. Selling is taking honest benefits and presenting them to the customer in a compelling way. Hyping is . . .well, often times hyping is lying.

So, what do you think? Is hype dead?




Comments

  1. Mara March 4th

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    I’d say it depends on your product and your target.

    For instance, doing marketing for higher ed, “hype” still appears to carry water with our older learners (the folks going back to school to train for a second or third career), while it doesn’t track at all with the prospective freshmen. The teen market (and increasingly, the 20-something market we belong to), is automatically suspicious of hype. Scads of articles have been written about the MTV generation, and how we’ve had to filter through ads all our lives. For the folks who don’t even remember when MTV played videos, it’s that much more. For them, hype is beyond dead; companies lie and they know it.

    For the folks who are somewhat older, however, habits are hard to break. There’s more fatigue there than there was 10 or even 5 years ago, but it’s not gone. They don’t take it as a given that ads lie the way younger folks do. They also haven’t had the same kind of media saturation – and thus aren’t as efficient filterers. For them, “hype” really can work.


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Chris Haddad

Chris "Mr. Moneyfingers" Haddad... Results-based marketing consultant, frankly-awesome direct response copywriter, strangely good dancer, capitalist hippie and all around great guy. On this site he shares all sorts of tips and tricks on how to make good money in bad times... opines fiercely on things that matter to him and occasionally goes a tad bit nuts. Plus he can do that thing with his eyebrow.