Hyping it Up
Many companies have this unusual urge to hype something months before it releases. It may be in any form like a picture tweet, a Facebook teaser, a YouTube video highlighting some key features or just a random out of the nowhere announcement on Google+. They think it might probably stir up fan interest and cause people to go crazy over that link they have just posted. So crazy that they might go and tell people all about it, share them on their feeds and publicise it. They also think it might be a good way to boost up interest in the company stocks by passing it as an indication that something revolutionary is going to be coming and that the price is going to shoot up, so the people invested are in for some heavy duty returns. Well, I think it doesn’t work that way. In essence you are doing what I like to call ‘Hyping it Up’.
‘Hyping’ is basically to promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its benefits. This is what Google says. Note the phrase, ‘exaggerating its benefits’. Every company thinks hyping will always yield positive results for itself. I think otherwise. It has more chances of a negative impact than positive. One of the examples is Apple Maps. Deemed as revolutionary and as good as Google Maps, Apple thought it was on the path to become legendary, it might have thought that it’s fans will go crazy, websites would rate the fly-over as gorgeous and that the stockholders would go nuts about it. However what happened was the exact opposite, in fact Apple had to release an apology letter and it even fired it’s senior vice president (SVP) of iOS Software, Scott Forstall for the miserable failure. In fact it was publicly insulted at many places and many companies used this to their advantage. Also, Apple lost it’s respect which in the long run can prove to be harmful.
A more recent hype would be Oppo, it publicly announced that it’s next flagship would have a 2K display. Where did it announce it? Well, Twitter. And as you can imagine now, more pixels means more publicity. The news went viral. So many websites covered it, good publicity I should say. But now, if the phone launches and is a miserable fail, then the fans and the investors won’t be happy.
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Oppo’s tweet.[/caption]
What hyping also does is that, it exposes yourself to your competitors. It’s more like a free kick being awarded to them. If they score, you are bound to lose and if they don’t well, they didn’t exploit all their chances. You reveal revolutionary features to your competitors and give them time to copy it. And if they release it before you, then well there goes the fan base, the investment, the stocks and the innovation that was put into that thing. So should you hype things? Well ‘Hyping it Up’ is like a trump card in a casino game, if it works, it’ll do wonders, if it doesn’t get ready for some international bashing. Thank you for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment below if you enjoyed reading.
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