Confessions of a (M)ad Man: The audacity of hype.

There's no hope for hype.

It's why that superbly reviewed movie all your friends were talking about, "smelled to heaven," as Shakespeare put it. Or why that Michelin Star restaurant recommended by everyone and their grandmother, tasted no better than a macaroni sandwich from the guy with the wooden cart, outside university.

I've had macaroni sandwiches. They sound like they shouldn't work, but they do.

Hyping is at the center of all great advertising campaigns. Without the unbridled excitement that accompanies even the most mundane product, sales suffer. After all, if you yourself aren't excited about your own product, why should anyone else be?

That's been the traditional thinking behind hyping something up to generate the excitement platform necessary to launch a product and have it experience an initial spike in sales. This initial increase in sales is often all that marketing managers need to claim that their product is a major success, and justify all the hype they initiated. So, in a sense, hype is self-perpetuating, feeding itself and rewarding its own self-importance, under the guise of "getting people talking".

They're talking, alright. They're saying: "This product's really annoying. Even if I need it, I'm not going to buy it".

There's nothing wrong with conveying the excitement and the passion you have for your product. It's quite another to resort to hyperbole or melodrama in the events that you plan for it (be it a PR event or an ad campaign). It's bad business and terrible branding for your product, since it makes it seem like an attention-seeking drama queen. A little restraint and an appropriate level of noise can do a better job for you.

Here's why:

1. People like well-branded products enough to buy them moreC*but they also hate annoyingly-branded products even more, to the point where they'll avoid them, out of sheer spite. Consumers may tolerate boring products, but they'll punish annoying ones.

2. Consumers are savvy enough to pick up exaggeration. Gone are the days when you could show a kid eating cheese triangles and then going out and breaking the record for goals scored in a football game. I tried that and all I managed to do was break wind.

3. If everyone around you is shouting (and they are), you're going to have to find a more creative way to outdo them, since more noise isn't going to help (not that that's deterred Cairo drivers). Sometimes, the best hype is no hype.

4. People have known this for a long time, but advertising apparently doesn't employ people: under-promise and over deliver. For example, if you spend the whole school term convincing your parents that you are a Neanderthal who can barely walk upright, they are much more likely to be happy if you get a 'C'. On the other hand, if you have set your parents' expectations to where they consider you one of the great thinkers of our time, and then proceed to get a B, your parents will probably beat you with sticks and remove you from their will.

5. Hype creates an unrealistic ideal that cannot possibly be equaled. So, even if your product delivers, consumers will still be left a little under-whelmed. Over-hyped products are like boy bands: everyone buys their records but very few actually like them; which means they have a fragile brand identity.

6. Make for an appropriate level of hype. Ghee (samna, to you and me) is what makes my mother's cooking taste good and will almost certainly kill me in the next six to eight months, but don't show kid actors asking their mother for a certain brand of ghee. It's not realistic.

7. Mindless, boundless hype usually means you don't have a strategy for selling your product. You're basically employing a flooding technique to overwhelm the consumer with noise. Hype disguises hopeless planning.

Hype-for-people is different from hype-for-products, aside from the fact that the latter is known as advertising and the former is known as PR: product-hype, as annoying as it is, is nowhere near as sinister and fraught with potential for abuse, as people-hype.

When you see a product or a service that's been hyped to within an inch of its life, you should be wary, because your hard-earned cash is at stake. But when it's a person, say a politician or an employer, you shouldn't just be wary, you should be suspicious.

Companies, ideologies and political systems have a tendency to hype themselves up, in order to consolidate their power over you and control every aspect of your life, reducing your ability to question them and hold them accountable.

It's human nature to crave power, because we are an ambitious species. But the rest of us need to remember that power turns its wielders into Not Delightful People.

Here's to change.

Mohammed Nassar was kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him. Feel free to email him at [e-mail] .

Daily NewsEgypt 2007

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