The best blog post ever written! AKA the folly of hyperbole

• November 25, 2010

By Linda Forrest

If there’s one sure way to turn prospects off, it’s to oversell. This is true in sales and in marketing. If you overhype something, you’re sure to disappoint. Case in point, last week’s iTunes announcement from Apple.

When Apple told the market that November 16 would be “a day you’ll never forget,” hopes were high. Would Apple announce that it had finally convinced the major record labels to play nice with one another and introduce a subscription-based approach to music downloads along the lines of what Netflix offers for movies? What could it be that would warrant such a bombastic statement? Surely, the announcement would have to change the face of music downloading forever in order to live up to the hype?

As everyone who is not living under a rock now knows, the announcement was the addition of the full Beatles catalogue to iTunes. As the surviving band members and their Apple Records label had resisted digital downloads for a long time, with a lawsuit or two along the way, this was big news for Apple. But “a day you’ll never forget”? Hardly. Actually, scratch that – it is a day I’ll never forget because I was heartily disappointed when the news didn’t live up to the hyperbole Apple had used to preview this announcement and a perfect example of the old adage “don’t believe the hype.”

While Apple is crowing about the 2 million songs downloaded in the first week, this seemingly impressive figure is modest when compared with the still-held U.S. sales record set by N’Sync in 2000 for albums sold, which was 2.42 million. In modern terms, country phenomenon Taylor Swift sold 279,000 digital copies of her full length album in the first week.

Not only was the addition of the Beatles catalogue to iTunes not a day that will enter the history books, but it hasn’t even performed that well. Sure it was a personal triumph for Steve Jobs, a huge Beatles fan who fought long and hard to get rights to offer the catalog, but it was the latest in a series of PR missteps for the company.

What can we as B2B tech marketers learn from Apple’s folly?

This is in fact a topic we’ve visited before. Way back in 2008, Leo called out Rogers for its hyperbolic ways and at the dawn of this blog, I wrote about how inmedia gets the best results for its clients when it presents information to the media in a definitive, easily understood way that doesn’t include spin or hyperbole. The same holds true today. Traditional media won’t tolerate it and social media definitely is suspicious of it, so you’ll be doing yourself and your clients a disservice by employing it.

B2B tech is famous for using egregious hyperbole in its marketing efforts. A recent howler from CIO documented the 10 most exaggerated tech terms, a list that included “leading vendor,” which is a battle we’ve fought more than once with clients. Leading how? If your news is indeed first, or better, or leading the market in some way, define your terms.

Ask any journalist and they’ll tell you that their garbage cans, virtual and otherwise, are filled with hyperbolic marketing material, which they didn’t read past the headline that overhyped the subject matter that followed unread. Don’t let your materials end up on the trash heap because you needlessly overdid it.