Hype

This is, admittedly, one of my biggest pet peeves about internet marketing.

Hype online has given internet marketing the same sort of reputation as used car salesmen. It is the butt of jokes, and the stigma is a huge barrier to anyone who is not of the same stamp as those who have left their heavy impression on people's memories.

When you use hype, you compromise your credibility. Hype consists of exaggeration, assuming you know how the reader feels (or worse, TELLING them HOW they should feel!), failure to give details in your focus on emotive superlatives, and using colors and punctuation in a manner that draws undue attention or gives unrealistic emphasis to the text. Hype also includes images that display an unrealistic and overinflated idea of the possible outcomes from the presented options. Any of those actions will make you suspect from word one.

Yes, some people DO buy from you when you use these tactics. But the very means of attracting those customers is the means of driving away your most valuable customers - those that think! When you persuade people to do things against their better judgment, and when you encourage impulse buys without giving them enough information to know whether they really will get what you think they will, you end up with dissatisfied customers. Dissatisfied customers won't come back.

On the other hand, if you give honest and forthright information, your customers will know what they are getting, and are more likely to be satisfied with the purchase long term. Further, satisfied customers who know that you can be trusted to be absolutely truthful will come back to you again and again, because they would rather purchase where they can trust than to take the risk on someone new.

Hype is a short sighted business choice. It assumes that the customer would not purchase if they knew the truth - in which case you should not be selling the product in the first place! It also assumes that customers are people to be taken advantage of, instead of people to form partnerships with for mutual benefit. It is disrespectful by implication, and assumes a lower intelligence in your customers than in yourself, when in fact the reverse may be true! You will lose all those customers who are more intelligent than you, and you may never be smart enough to find out just how many that is, because the smart ones won't even click through to your pages.

People who market using hype ride the fine line between dishonesty and litigation. Too cowardly to commit to either open honesty, or outright criminal behavior, they, like Henry the VIII, wrap themselves in a cloak of comforting self-deception, and never manage to see the truth of what it is they actually do, or what it is that they have become.

It is not dishonest, nor is hype required to present things from the customer's point of view. When you tell them that you use PayPal to contain costs so you can give them the best value, that is not dishonest, nor is it hype. It is merely a way of stating things so that the customer can see the benefit to themselves. But to say that you use PayPal because it is the safest and most reliable payment solution online for them to use, is neither accurate, nor honest. It is not a BAD solution, but it cannot be accurately classed as the safest nor the most reliable. This is the difference between hype and good marketing. One reaches a customer in an honest and appealing way, the other presents the information in the way that the seller wishes were truth, no matter how far it is from the actual fact.

Build your business on a firm foundation of total integrity. Hype has no place in such a structure.