In the book The 22 Immutable Law’s Of Marketing law #20 is The Law of Hype and it says, “The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.”  Most of us have had the experience of seeing something promoted on television, getting excited about that and picking up a phone to have one delivered to your home. Then you get it home, bust it out of it’s box and it falls well short of doing what the guy on television said it would do! I remember as a kid wanting this incredible race car track that would allow your cars to virtually defy gravity doing loops upside down among other things. Well it didn’t perform as advertised and I was MAD! What kind of company would crush the hopes and dreams of a little kid after all? Over selling your products can kill you if your not careful, mostly today in the You Tube world we live in.  Check out THIS video of some guys giving the Ron Popeil hair in a can a test drive. I think Ron oversold this one. Think about how many mattress companies have launched lines in Vegas to great hype that are no longer being sold at retail? What does it do to your credibility if everything you bring to market is tagged as THE NEXT BEST THING. Not everybody does that but there are a few that go that big on all product launches and at the end of the day it has to hurt them. I think it is important to be enthusiastic about the products that you develop, but if you are going to tout them as the “end all be all” then they had better deliver or your credibility will suffer.  As they say, under promise and over deliver and you will make everyone happy.

Law #21 is the Law of Acceleration. “Successful programs are not built on fads, they are built on trends. A fad is the wave in the ocean and a trend is the tide….Like a wave a fad is very visible but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like a tide, the trend is almost invisible, but its very powerful over the long term.” When memory foam came along, there were a lot of people that thought it would come and go as a fad, similar to water beds but that didn’t happen. The category started out slow and was built over time and supported in a very substantial way with a strong marketing program that turned it into the tide/trend. The book says that if you have something that looks like it is going to be a fad, your best bet is to slow it down a little, maybe even restrict distribution so you don’t over expose it, and create a long lasting demand. Sometimes being red hot can burn you out. If you look at what everyone is doing with memory foam these days in bringing it down market and driving a lot of the focus to price, this trend could turn to a  fad in a hurry.

Have you ever created something that turned into a trend in the market? What did that take and can you do it again?