From Puffery To Praise: How to Turn Hype Into Sales

A spin doc­tor is a per­son, mostly politi­cians and pub­lic rela­tions firms, who attempt to do dam­age con­trol by down­play­ing some­thing truly neg­a­tive. They try to put a pos­i­tive “spin” on some­thing unfavorable.

Are copy­writ­ers spin doc­tors? Maybe.

But there’s a dif­fer­ence between putting a pos­i­tive spin on a neg­a­tive idea, ver­sus putting a prod­uct, a fea­ture, or an idea in a pos­i­tive light that can be per­ceived as negative.

Left to her own devices, a reader can come to many con­clu­sions. Both right and wrong. Both true and false. Both real and nonex­is­tent. Copy, in this case, has the power to steer the reader in the right direc­tion — and there­fore avoid going in the wrong one.

One such tool that enables copy­writ­ers to do this is hyperbole.

Hype is not bad and it’s often given a bad rap. The prob­lem is not hype in and of itself. It’s when it is per­ceived as hype. When hype is con­spic­u­ous, that’s when the copy did a poor job, mak­ing the offer or its author appear smarmy, mis­lead­ing, even scammy.

How­ever, hyper­bole is pow­er­ful because it helps to drive home some impor­tant points, and aids in the com­pre­hen­sion of crit­i­cal or com­plex ideas.

So, how can you turn puffery into praise? “Hyper­bole” into “hallelujah?”

The mind thinks in rel­a­tive terms and not in direct terms.

So to under­stand a key point as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble, the mind can do so eas­ily when it is given some­thing it can com­pare it to — some­thing the mind already knows, remem­bers, visu­al­izes, under­stands, and believes.

It’s like com­par­ing the size of one acre — some­thing the mind can’t visu­al­ize or refer to, unless you’re a land sur­veyor by trade — to the size of a foot­ball field.

Exag­ger­a­tion is the same thing. It’s sub­jec­tive, not objec­tive. There­fore, using hyper­bole can add not only emo­tion and vibrancy, but also under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion. At a deeper, inti­mate level. A vis­ceral level.

But used prop­erly, exag­ger­a­tion can invoke vivid men­tal pic­tures. And it should.

Peo­ple will see it for what it is. Cog­ni­tively, they will know it’s improb­a­ble. But they will not dis­count its mes­sage and the mean­ing behind it, because they under­stand what the author is try­ing to do — which is to make a point and not to deceive.

For exam­ple, there’s no such thing as “boat­loads of money,” “a flood of web­site traf­fic,” or “mur­der­ing your com­pe­ti­tion.” These are obvi­ously exag­ger­a­tions and untrue.

(Take the song “Love Shack” by the B-​​52s: “I bought me a Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale and it’s about to set sail!” That’s a metaphor. How­ever, metaphors, sim­i­les, and analo­gies often employ hyper­bole in order to con­vey a greater message.)

But used judi­ciously, exag­ger­a­tions can be for­mi­da­ble tools to drive points home more effec­tively, pow­er­fully, effi­ciently, and com­pellingly. They allow read­ers to grasp the mean­ing of the mes­sage, and not just the mes­sage itself.

Overused, how­ever, or used in the wrong way, hype not only can be per­ceived as too sen­sa­tional and unbe­liev­able, but also can become coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and destroy any cred­i­bil­ity you’re try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with your copy. Even if the rest is factual.

This is when peo­ple say “it’s all hype.”

Granted, some peo­ple use hype to make a point. Oth­ers use hype to aggres­sively push their wares. When hype is used in the for­mer, sel­dom will peo­ple even real­ize its use. But in the case of the lat­ter, peo­ple will see it because it’s so glar­ingly obvious.

What’s the difference?

It’s in the perception.

It’s like a pro­fes­sional car sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive who works in the best inter­est of the cus­tomer and uses some exag­ger­a­tion to make sure the client grasps some key points, ver­sus an over­bear­ing, stereo­typ­i­cal used-​​car sales­man who overuses hype and, par­don the pun, like a bull­dozer tries to plow their way into a sale.

One topic that came about dur­ing a dis­cus­sion with one of my mem­bers is the con­cept of peo­ple try­ing to increase the value of some infor­ma­tion prod­uct by mak­ing incred­i­ble, puffed-​​up com­par­isons that are obvi­ously too far-​​fetched.

(And “obvi­ously” is the point, here.)

For exam­ple, they man­u­fac­ture a higher fake price to enhance the size of a dis­count, when the dis­counted price is the real price all along — which, by the way, is ille­gal accord­ing to adver­tis­ing laws in most locales.

Another is the use of exag­ger­ated fig­ures in order to strengthen the value of the prod­uct, but when over­done the exag­ger­a­tion is per­ceived as an attempt to inflate and mis­lead, and there­fore sell under false pretenses.

You’ve heard of them before, like, “Get $29,857.97 worth of bonuses if you buy today!” Or, “The esti­mated retail value is $5,000, but you can get it today for only $9.95!”

It is often said that peo­ple are cyn­i­cal and skep­ti­cal, and have built-​​in bunk-​​detectors. That’s not entirely true. Rather, I believe peo­ple have innate cred­i­bil­ity detec­tors.

When an exag­ger­ated claim is made, with­out any cred­i­bil­ity or any­thing to back it up, that’s when the alarm bells tend to go off. And this is true even when there’s very lit­tle exag­ger­a­tion, if any. The copy doesn’t just lack truth. It also lacks the “ring of truth.”

Again, it’s all about perception.

Nev­er­the­less, this type of approach is not only despi­ca­ble but also extremely coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Peo­ple see the exag­ger­a­tion not as try­ing to make a point but as a bold­face lie, which under­mines any attempt at build­ing credibility.

And lack of cred­i­bil­ity is what makes some sales copy per­ceived as “too hypey,” “too salesy,” “too much like a stereo­typ­i­cal saleslet­ter,” etc. (And above all, too scammy.)

Use it this way only once in the copy, and peo­ple will imme­di­ately dis­count any­thing and every­thing else that is being said, whether it’s 100% true or not. They will doubt every word you write. And per­haps every­thing else you sell, too.

But this where the power of words comes in.

Here’s an example.

That mem­ber men­tioned ear­lier posited a sce­nario, which he opposed. He went on to explain that some peo­ple, in order to sell an infor­ma­tion prod­uct, inflate the price of their exper­tise in order to empha­size the value of the product.

For exam­ple, “I charge $1,000 an hour for con­sult­ing but I put my exper­tise in this $37 ebook.” Nat­u­rally, just said in this way makes the state­ment appear incred­i­ble. (And I mean that lit­er­ally, as in not cred­i­ble.) As a result, the entire pitch thus becomes sus­pect, even if the exag­ger­a­tion is used only once in the copy.

Sure, there are peo­ple who say they charge that much for the pur­poses of inflat­ing their value, and oth­ers who, even though they never really charged that much, would, depend­ing on the cir­cum­stance — such as a way to pre­vent any clients from hir­ing them.

I know some peo­ple who do charge that much. Per­son­ally, I charge $500 an hour or more, which depends on the case and type of con­sult­ing work required. And I cur­rently have eight clients who pay that much when they hire me for ad hoc consulting.

But there’s a clear dis­tinc­tion between peo­ple who never charged that much but would, and peo­ple who would never charge that much. Ever.

Some peo­ple don’t want clients. They pre­fer to sell prod­ucts and, if some­one ever asked to hire them, they quote exor­bi­tant fees as a high entry bar­rier for the sole pur­pose of dri­ving the prospect away. They want to steer clear of work­ing with clients.

For instance, that mem­ber said:

Just because they charge [x] amount doesn’t mean peo­ple are tak­ing them up on their consulting.

True.

Per­haps that’s because they don’t want any­one to take them up on it in the first place. In fact, the mar­ket­ing strat­egy may be such that, the per­ceived value is placed not only in that person’s exper­tise but also in that person’s time.

It’s like another way of say­ing, “The only way you can hire me is to buy my product.”

But (and this is a big “but”)…

It’s boils down to intent, cred­i­bil­ity, and, more impor­tantly, per­cep­tion. I can’t speak for that person’s intent or cred­i­bil­ity. But per­cep­tion is key — if not done right, such a stand­alone exag­ger­a­tion can be per­ceived as bull manure. And it often is.

Some peo­ple do use this strat­egy to merely inflate the value of their exper­tise “dis­closed” in some ebook, to in turn prop up the value of the ebook. That’s deceit.

How­ever, oth­ers do use this strat­egy for real, log­i­cal rea­sons. What they say or mean to say may be entirely true. But they fail to jus­tify it and com­mu­ni­cate it in their copy. This goes back to the power of adding “rea­sons why.”

In short, they fail to back up their claims, exag­ger­ated or not.

If some­one care­fully explained in their copy that the rea­son they charge so much for their time (and hence why the ebook is so valu­able) is because they don’t want clients, and would pre­fer to sell some ebook instead, that would be more plausible.

I’d go a step fur­ther in say­ing that the per­son can say:

“I used to charge $100 an hour for con­sult­ing, but that’s when I was tak­ing on new clients. But because so many peo­ple asked me ques­tions about [my exper­tise] and there are only so many hours in the day, I wrote this ebook to ‘dupli­cate myself’ and save me time so I can cut down on my work­load. Today, I no longer take on clients. In fact, if you were to hire me, I’d charge $1,000 an hour. Why? Because I sim­ply don’t want to con­sult any­more. The only way you can get my exper­tise nowa­days is to buy my book.”

To me, that’s a heck of a lot more real­is­tic and believ­able than some puffed-​​up claim about a seem­ingly non-​​existent con­sult­ing fee. In other words, the “rea­son why” in the above exam­ple is used to inflate value not specif­i­cally but implicitly.

My men­tor used to say these two impor­tant truths:

1. “Per­ceived truth is more pow­er­ful than truth itself.”
2. And, “Impli­ca­tion is more pow­er­ful than specification.”

So per­cep­tion is really the key — or the cul­prit, depend­ing on the case. More impor­tant, exag­ger­a­tion is not meant to specif­i­cally denote some con­crete fact, but to imply its more sub­jec­tive mean­ing in an effort to instill a greater appre­ci­a­tion of it.

It really all boils down to how you word your copy.

That said, how­ever, the ear­lier mem­ber added this inter­est­ing yet pow­er­ful tidbit:

Although I agree some­what, the bot­tom line is nobody believes it. I don’t even think it does any­thing for per­cep­tion as I don’t know ANYBODY that would believe that crap.

I under­stand your posi­tion as far as not want­ing clients, etc. but it comes down to what they actu­ally charge. I just think it makes some­body look REAL dumb when they say stuff like this. But then again, that’s just my perception.

Yes, it is just that person’s per­cep­tion, which is the point. This person’s com­ment actu­ally said a lot more, par­tic­u­larly about the very point I’m try­ing to make. Let me explain…

He said, “Nobody believes it.” Which is a uni­ver­sal, and there­fore a mis­lead­ing and untrue, state­ment. I mean, nobody? As in, not one sin­gle per­son? How does he know for sure? Real­is­ti­cally, he doesn’t. And can’t. It’s impossible.

(Plus, as you can see, by say­ing “nobody” this per­son equally made an exag­ger­ated claim — the very thing he spoke out against — to make his point. But I digress.)

How­ever, to give that per­son credit, he did fol­low up with this telling state­ment: “I don’t know any­body that would believe that crap.” And that’s likely true. In fact, it says it all right there, and I’ll come back to this in a sec­ond because it’s important.

First, he said, “It comes down to what they actu­ally charge.” True, but one wouldn’t come to that con­clu­sion if there was ample proof or a rea­son­able expla­na­tion in the copy.

If they don’t want clients (and that’s just one rea­son among a pos­si­bil­ity of many oth­ers, which nev­er­the­less should have been explained in the copy), they might indeed really charge that much. But the prob­lem is, it wasn’t said.

So, it leaves the reader guess­ing. And that’s not good.

They just put this seem­ingly fake num­ber out there with no real­is­tic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, no log­i­cal expla­na­tion, no believ­able backup — thus leav­ing it to be desired.

If you don’t give any rea­sons why to jus­tify and backup your claims, every­thing you say will indeed look sus­pect and con­sid­ered “hype.” Peo­ple will invari­ably come to con­clu­sions — and with­out proof, they will likely be the wrong ones.

Now, com­ing back to his state­ment of “nobody believes it,” I believe that’s not nec­es­sar­ily true in all cases. Granted, it is an out­right lie in some cases, where some unscrupu­lous mar­keters fla­grantly attempt to deceive and fraud­u­lently coerce their readers.

But I also believe that, in most cases, poor copy is the rea­son read­ers come to such neg­a­tive con­clu­sions, even when the mar­keter and their motives are honest.

When the mem­ber above said “Nobody believes that crap,” he’s right — in other words, nobody would believe that crap. (Mean­ing, when it is said in “that” way.)

In this case, it’s per­ceived as “crap” because there are no rea­sons to believe otherwise.

If I was the copy­writer in the above exam­ple, I would have con­veyed the value of my time and not my exper­tise. Time is scarce. Exper­tise, how­ever, is per­ceived as abun­dant — unless it’s truly unique proven through his­tor­i­cal data or degree of specialization.

So rather than spec­i­fy­ing it out­right, one can use copy to imply it. In other words, by focus­ing on lack of avail­abil­ity, espe­cially on the expert’s inabil­ity to accom­mo­date such a large demand, the exper­tise becomes implic­itly valu­able because it is made scarce.

The ques­tion is, is there a bal­ance? In other words, does the per­cep­tion of cred­i­bil­ity meet or exceed the per­cep­tion of hype, exag­ger­a­tion, or implausibility?

Let me give you another example.

Here’s a true story I told when I used to teach mar­ket­ing in college.

Two guys opened a pre­mium cof­fee shop in, if I recall the story cor­rectly, Toronto, Canada. They sold gourmet cof­fee beans. But they were fail­ing and floun­der­ing — so much so, they were forced to go out of busi­ness because they couldn’t pay rent.

Just a few weeks prior to the clos­ing date, one of the part­ners wanted to pro­mote a “going out of busi­ness” sale, and slash the cof­fee prices in half in order to get rid of their inven­tory before they closed their doors for good.

To that person’s dis­may, the other sug­gested they should dou­ble their prices instead. “What do we have to lose?” he said. “We’re going out of busi­ness anyway.”

An argu­ment ensued, but the first one gave in. With one con­di­tion: that they would give it try but only for a day, just to see. So with a bit of trep­i­da­tion, they took the risk and dou­bled the prices of their “pre­mium” coffee.

To their total sur­prise, they sold out that day.

Today, that lit­tle cof­fee shop in Toronto has trans­formed into a large national franchise.

Bot­tom line, peo­ple couldn’t believe that “pre­mium” cof­fee could be so cheap. Was the price inflated? Yes. Was it per­ceived as being inflated? Nope. And that’s my point.

Here’s another story.

Oprah Win­frey did a show once on mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ing. To prove her point, she ran “taste tests” in shop­ping malls across the U.S. While her point was about decep­tion, to me it also taught more about the power of per­cep­tion.

She had her staff place two bot­tles of apple juice on small tables, and asked passers-​​by to taste each of them to decide which one tasted better.

One was a plain, white plas­tic bot­tle with a pic­ture of an apple on its label. The other was an intri­cately shaped glass bot­tle, with a red label don­ning the pic­ture of an elderly lady cook­ing apple juice in her kitchen the old-​​fashioned way.

If I’m not mis­taken, over 70% said the juice from the glass bot­tle tasted bet­ter (only a few said the first one tasted bet­ter, while the rest said there was no real difference).

When asked, they said, “The sec­ond one is sweeter tast­ing,” “it’s crisper and fresher,” “the pic­ture of the lady tells me they take greater care in prepar­ing the juice,” and so on.

Mean­while, hid­den cam­eras revealed they were sur­rep­ti­tiously fill­ing up both bot­tles with the exact same juice from the same large con­tainer hid­den under­neath the tables.

Was it mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ing? That’s arguable.

Sure, what Oprah did was mis­lead­ing for the pur­poses of her exper­i­ment. How­ever, under nor­mal cir­cum­stances it wouldn’t mis­lead­ing in a neg­a­tive way. The pack­ag­ing enhanced people’s per­cep­tions of the juice and placed it in its best pos­si­ble light.

The point remains.

Hype is only hype when it is per­ceived as hype.

Sim­i­larly, if you’re going to inflate an idea, a fea­ture, or an offer, and if you’re going to use hyper­bole to make your point and con­vey a deeper mean­ing behind your mes­sage, make sure to deflate it with a proper bal­ance of logic, cred­i­bil­ity, and rea­sons why.

My wife once told me a story of one of her clients whose web­site gave out free bot­tles of nutri­tional sup­ple­ments. The head­line said: “Free 30-​​Day Sup­ply!” But peo­ple weren’t respond­ing well. They prob­a­bly thought to them­selves, “What’s the catch?”

But then they added this sim­ple state­ment: “Why free? Because we’re so con­fi­dent you’re going to love our prod­uct that, once you try it, you will want to come back to us for all your nutri­tional needs.” Their response shot through the roof.

Ulti­mately, nobody believes bla­tant, explicit attempts to puff up, inflate, and exag­ger­ate. But it’s the lack of cred­i­bil­ity and log­i­cal rea­sons why that often makes it so.

You’ve heard of it before…

“Peo­ple buy on emo­tion first but jus­tify their deci­sion with logic.”

Con­se­quently, don’t be afraid to use hyper­bole to drive home some crit­i­cal points, add per­sua­sive­ness to your copy, and con­vey a greater, more inti­mate mean­ing to your mes­sage. But when you do, always add a log­i­cal, jus­ti­fi­able, and plau­si­ble rea­son why.

When you do, the per­cep­tion, I sub­mit, would be entirely different.

About the Author

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