Less Hype, More Credibility

One part of my job as a PR consultant is to help my clients position themselves and their products — and do it without the hype that so easily creeps into both written and oral communications. Keep the fluff out of press releases, and especially out of press and analyst briefings, and focus on the value to the customer. A blog post by analyst relations firm SageCircle, “When Hype can go overboard and hurt credibility,” (recently resurrected on Twitter), “identified hype as one of the five ‘analyst hot button’ issues that can needlessly derail a vendor-analyst briefing.” I completely agree with this graph:

The big problem is that analysts really listen to marketing language and don’t blow off some puffery like a prospect would. So claiming superiority or asserting that your product is “Best in Class” can be a red flag if the claim does not match the analyst’s view of the market. What happens next is rarely good for the vendor representatives doing the briefing. The analyst might interrupt the briefing probing for a definition of what it really means to be “the leaders” or “world class” or whatever and then demand hard evidence that the vendor really meets the criteria. Then the briefing could be consumed on what is really a tangential discussion. Or the analyst could sit quietly with a smirk on his or her face while thinking “What a load of BS, I bet everything they are saying is BS.” The second outcome is worse because it implies long term damage to credibility and may go unnoticed.

Disgust for hype obviously isn’t limited to analysts; the press don’t buy it either. So, what can you do to keep the fluff out? Here’s some good tips from SageCircle:

 SageCircle Technique:

• Examine presentation content and talk tracks looking for hype
• Determine if the claims have reasonable definitions (e.g., not something like “among left hand users on Guam”)
• Determine if the claims can be backed up with proof aligned with the definitions and have that proof available if needed
• Tone down or (best) eliminate hype that can’t be substantiated