Hype is a mixture of direct marketing, advertising, buzz, and just word of mouth. Hype is a fun marketing technique that, when used on something that is worth the hype, is amazing.

The Good

In this day and age it seems that hype is really a part of our culture. Everything is hyped to be something great, amazing, or the next big thing. The Dark Knight had a lot of hype. Because of that hype, I went into it with really high expectations. Did it live up to my expectations? Oh boy, did it! It not only fulfilled my Batman love, but it made me ALMOST consider it better than Iron Man — I would like to take this moment to explain that I consider Iron Man to be the better movie for three reasons. One, I like that superhero better so I am automatically biased towards him. Two, its Marvel, and again, I am biased towards any of their work over anything DC related. And three, Iron Man did not have a love story or a leading lady completely make or break the plot line — but as it stands, they are at a tie for my love and affection.

The Bad

Now, another good example of hype would be the Hulk movies. The one from 2004 was heavily hyped and did not live to anyones expectations. Granted, if it wasn’t so hyped, maybe our expectations would not have been so high and we would not have been so rudely disappointed? No one will know for sure, but one thing that it do was ensure that the following one would have very low expectations coming into it. Because of that, I actually liked the movie. I did not expect it to be an amazing movie but I left it content and somewhat all right with spending some money on movie tickets.

The Ugly

Every day something new comes to market. The people behind these products and services are hoping to create a buzz that looks like unpaid hype. Great examples of where this went wrong: Speed Racer, the Zune, Star Wars III, and possibly other things, but they disappointed me so much that I can’t even remember what they were. All had a crazy amount of hype to build them up to be something they weren’t: Amazing.

Just remember that if you are going to start hype about something, make sure that you can follow it up with one 100% surefire bonafide kick-ass thing.

Tags: hype, marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 8:41 am and is filed under Running a Business | . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.