What's wrong with a little honesty?
I participate in a couple of forums here and there related to graphic and web design and every once in a while I encounter a posting that just happens to fire up my amygdala and even more about the amygdala here. You know the ones, they all come off sounding like a snake oil salesman from the old west that promise that if you use a product that they too use you'll be bigger, better, harder and faster than you've ever imagined you could be. My gripe isn't so much with the fact that these individuals are hyping their product but more in their approach.
The sad part is you can usually spot them from the Mir space station. The pattern typically goes: First they log in to a site, create a new user account and then spam the site with anywhere from one to a dozen posts. The context of the message is so over the top that my teeth start to hurt with how sugar laced their messages are about its wondrous virtues and the miracle of how it will; whiten your teeth, disinfect your hard drive and calibrate your monitor while enabling your ailing grandmother to once again be a linebacker for the "Green Bay Packers". They pretend to be an actual, bona fide, honest and for true users of this product.
Okay, to be blunt. Come on people. Give your potential customers some credit for having some smarts. As a marketer you've go to be pretty naive to believe that people don't see through this. If you've got a product to flog what's wrong with a little honesty? Show your potential clients that you have something that you're proud of, or at the very least something that you've put some work into and want to recoup your investment. What's the features and benefits? What does it do and how will it make my life better?
If your product is that shoddy or you really want to cater to a clientele that's incapable of making informed decisions perhaps you should reevaluate your target audience and direct your marketing efforts more towards the back page of a supermarket tabloid or one of the www.xxx forums.
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