Three marketing concepts we live with every day and that affect the results of our marketing campaigns.
We explain each of them in detail:
What is hype?
“Hype” is a concept derived from hyperbole, used to describe excitement about something, whether it’s a game, a movie or the launch of a new cryptocurrency.
Although the concept existed long before the word, it became popular in the digital age and is now used as the label for a marketing strategy. It’s achieved with a huge, noisy campaign that builds great anticipation and connection with customers. It also requires a high degree of interaction with consumers, which is why social media is the perfect channel for it.
What are its advantages?
Hype as a marketing strategy is quite effective: it’s based on creating need and excitement for our product, building anticipation and making consumers want to get it as soon as possible.
And this is achieved with minimal investment, since social media is a low-cost channel with maximum exposure if you know how to use it.
The keys to implementing it
This strategy is widely used in the digital world, but it covers many types of companies. You can find it in the entertainment industry, in video games, series and movies, as well as in the tech industry with smartphones, consoles and apps. Below are the keys to making it work.
Branding
Work on your brand: you need a strong image to implement this kind of strategy.
Companies need to invest in the product launch, but also establish their brand image, so that when the campaign ends the brand manages to position itself. If expectations are met, the results will be very positive for the company.
Build anticipation
You need to present your product so that consumers want to have it as soon as possible, before anyone else, and want to know everything about it.
It’s generally used for launches of new products or innovations on existing ones. You need to focus on the idea that this product didn’t exist before and now it’s urgent to have it.
Presence
It’s essential to have or build a media presence so you can make a lot of noise and get your campaign to as many people as possible. This element is crucial, since we want to interact with customers, ask them questions, give them a look at our launches and build anticipation.
Contests
Encourage participation and engagement on your social media with giveaways, where people take part through mentions, likes and subscriptions. This will help create a positive image in the consumer’s eyes, strengthen your connection with customers and gain followers for a bigger online presence.
Represent your brand
Choose an ambassador for your brand wisely: it should be someone with influence in your branch of the industry, who has followers and shares your brand’s values.
They should create a sense of urgency to get your product, giving the idea that it’s very exclusive and will sell out quickly if people don’t buy it: they should project urgency.
What is FOMO? What is FUD? How do they influence us?
“FOMO” stands for “Fear Of Missing Out” and is defined as a type of anxiety that social media has heightened. Although it’s mainly associated with being unable to disconnect and the fear that something will happen while we’re not paying attention to our social media, FOMO can influence brands’ sales.
Basically, it’s the effect we create with hype campaigns: a feeling among consumers of not wanting to miss out. This collective anxiety can increase our product’s sales and exposure.
The key words for using it are scarcity and urgency: to create FOMO, consumers need to feel that if they don’t buy, book or subscribe now, they’ll miss out on something important, a one-off event.
FUD, which stands for “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, goes hand in hand with this concept. It’s another type of anxiety that influences decision-making when buying or investing in a product. FOMO feeds on FUD and vice versa, and they can be very influential in markets.
Things to keep in mind
It’s fine to build high expectations and make people eager to buy, but your product needs to live up to those expectations; otherwise, you may damage your brand image.
FOMO and FUD can bring about massive sales of or investment in your product and inflate its value through expectation, but that may not end well if the value of the expectation is greater than the value of the product itself. There have been cases where FUD and FOMO have killed products, especially in the world of cryptocurrencies. A recent and very controversial case was the LUNA coin, whose value and solvency had been stable: this anxiety led many people to invest, sending its value soaring to exaggerated levels, and it ended up collapsing until it was worth nothing. You can also see this phenomenon with movies or series that generate a lot of anticipation: brands invest in merchandising that ends up unsold when the movie doesn’t live up to expectations.
Conclusion
Marketing in the digital age is increasingly complicated and competition is fierce. The idea is always to stand out, and we can do that by adding hype to our campaigns.
We need to make sure our product lives up to the hype, so that people feel the FOMO and FUD they felt was justified. This will give you an image of trust, connect you with your customers, and the investment will be minimal.
If hype is part of your strategy, you’ll also want to work on your branding and make the most of it in your email marketing campaigns.
These three concepts work so well because they activate very powerful psychological triggers, such as the fear of being left out.
