The hype pedestal
by Sapphire (May 6, 2008)
There’s a truism I’ve noticed throughout my observations of the business world, and it applies to every industry - movies, real estate, medicine, all of it: hype can take you to dizzying heights, but the air’s much richer where the quality is.
Transactions are both Vulcan and Human.
Business transactions have two components: the quality of the results, and the way the transaction makes you feel. These two don’t always have a lot to do with each other. Some people can make you feel very good while they’re screwing you over, or fail to make you feel particularly good when they’re actually doing great work for you. More people are attuned to the emotional part of the transaction than the logical part where they ask themselves, “Wait a second - THIS is all I’m getting out of this?” That’s critical thinking at work. Everyone’s born with emotions, but critical thinking takes learning and some people never get there.
If you’re the one selling something, your monetary success can come from actually being good (”Wow, that doctor may be gruff, but he saved my friend when all the experts gave her two months to live!”) or it can come from hype (launching a huge ad campaign that says, “Steve Jones - best doctor in town! He’ll fix you right up and give you a lollipop free of charge!”). People fall for hype partly because they don’t know the person’s job well enough to tell if she knows what she’s doing, and partly because they’re responding to the immediate gratification of being made to feel special (”Yay, I go to the best doctor in town, Steve Jones! I know he’s the best, I saw it on the side of a bus!”). For that reason, charmers who hype themselves will always have a big audience.
But hype is a pedestal. You climb onto it by networking and getting yourself press exposure, and by promoting “specials” such as discounts, freebies and loss-leaders. Hype always makes the big money in the short term because it appeals to people’s emotions. The problem is, there’s always someone right behind you waiting to emotionally gratify your customer base right out from under you. It’s like dating, except at no point do you even have the illusion this customer will stay with you until death do you part. You have to make customers feel special every day and never let them forget you, and how do you do that?
At the end of the day, hype will have more customers and maybe make more money, but quality will generate more profit - more ROI on your work.
If you’re hype based, you have to continually expend energy and/or money promoting yourself (or your website or your product), sucking up to people, responding to people. You generally have to keep your prices low because - unless you have exceptional, Hollywood star level public relations, which ain’t cheap - having low prices is part of how you will make your potential customers feel happy about the transaction. That is one of the things emotional customers always seek - low price, high ROI. If that’s your customer base, you will forever be at their mercy and at the mercy of the people above you who can make or break your rep.
You also have to jump the instant the competition gets an edge. You can’t be five seconds late out the gate, or they’ll steal your edge and you might never get it back. No days off for you! You have to expend crazy amounts of time and energy defending yourself whenever accusations of incompetence or mediocrity arise. These are always tricky, stressful periods - will the choir to whom you preach stay loyal? Or will they get some instant emotional gratification from the next appealing message and leave you in the dust? It’s a never-ending battle for the audience. You have to win them every day.
Quality only has to win them once. If you’re quality based, it can be really frustrating waiting for people to find you and tell their friends. A lot of your crowd won’t have friends to tell because they’re not great networkers themselves. But while you might never make as much money or have as many readers as a site that buys its readers through hype, you and your visitors will get what you both want out of your quality site - you’ll have the income and type of work you want to do, and they’ll have whatever they needed that you delivered. Once they find you, they won’t forget you because it’s not in their best interest to.
Sites that rely on hype will always get the customers first because there’s always a new crop of young and naive people, totally emotion-based, finding them (why do you think marketers target the young?). But as people mature, they realize the best-feeling transactions are the ones that give them good results, and that’s when they find sites/businesses that offer real quality.
Some marketers like the challenge of being all hype. They love the excitement of the political maneuvers and the constant need to manipulate. If you don’t love those things, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is it’ll take you longer to reach where you want to be. The good news is, once you get there you’ll have more time to turn off your cellphone and take a nap. You’ll be on solid ground instead of a pedestal someone can knock you off of.
Posted in Staying on Track
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