Mind Readings: The Price of Overexaggeration

In today's episode of Mind Readings, let's talk about over exaggeration. If you listen to how marketers market things and how people talk these days, we've kind of painted ourselves into a corner. Think about some of the terms that people love to use either in conversation or in marketing. Calling folks besties or best friends, uh saying that something's amazing or game changing or mind blowing or awesome. We use these terms in increasingly extreme ways to grab attention, right?

To get attention. And in the process for this mad grab for attention, we've sort of diluted the meaning of every single superlative available to the point where you can't make any more useful distinctions, right? What's the difference between a project uh a product that's amazing and a product that's uh mind blowing? I don't know. Um, what's the difference between somebody who's uh a good friend, a BFF, and a bestie?

Again, I don't know. When we lose the ability to make these useful distinctions, we lose the ability to actually show when something is important, right? If everything is awesome, then nothing's really awesome, right? It becomes a meaningless term. When every product uh or service or uh company is revolutionary.

At that point, that term doesn't have any meaning. So, what are we supposed to do about this? Uh, how are you supposed to make useful distinctions? The thing I would try doing is actually approaching it from the contrarian point of view. What would happen if you started off a press release instead instead of saying, you know, Trust Insights is excited to reveal its latest product, right?

What if you you said Trust Insights is mildly pleased to release its newest product that uh is completely believable, right? As opposed to unbelievable, uh, and will satisfy customers' needs for doing this particular task with a minimum of difficulty, as opposed to saying as you know, revolutionary products gonna change everything and and completely alter the way you work. Because let's be honest, most products don't do that. Uh, most services, most companies at best have an additive quality to your life, right? They help make your life a little bit better.

Very few products are so impressive that they fundamentally change how you live or work. But more important, when you use language from this sort of contrarian point of view, it is in itself attention getting because it's different than what people are used to hearing. Everybody is used to hearing uh about revolutionary game-changing products instead of products that will minorly help you in your work day. This product will save you uh several dollars in perhaps a few minutes a day, right? As opposed to saying this is gonna save you millions of dollars and deliver outstanding ROI, and we know those products will not actually do that.

So if you were to describe your marketing and your products and your services with terms that were more accurate to the emotional state that they actually create in your customers, what would that look like? And how would it attract the attention of people who are deafened to the overuse of superlatives? Right? When you can't tell the difference between something that's awesome and terrific, and somebody says, This product is just north of mediocre, at the very least, you're like, what? What does that mean?

And it's a conversation starter, it's a way for you to interrupt a pattern that everybody else is doing and do something different. Do something that gets people to pay attention to you. So if you were to describe products and services for the actual emotional impact they have, you'll get more attention. You'll get more conversation. You'll get happier customers in a lot of ways because if you accurately describe your product as minorly satisfying, right?

There's a lot of scratching your head initially. But if you set that expectation and your product delivers on that expectation, then you have a happier customer than describing your product as revolutionary. And then the customer's like, well, my job's pretty much the same. And I save two minutes a day on this task. Eh?

Because if you're charging somebody for a revolutionary product and you're not delivering, you're you're gonna be in for a bad time, right? At some point, somebody will say, What are we paying all this money for this product that says it does this thing and really doesn't do this thing? As opposed to saying, here is a product that lives up to its billing, right? It is a nice minor convenience. And you can have a debate about the pricing of a nice minor convenience, but you won't have to worry about people going, well, they promised me the world and all they gave me was a taco, right?

Now, tacos are good, but they're again, there's not one of those things that is going to change the world and bring about world peace. So that's today's mind reading. Just some thoughts about how we use our language and being more precise in our use of language, being more accurate in our use of language, so that it aligns with expectations, it aligns with the experience people will have, and it stands out from everybody else who is saying that their product is the next uh best thing since sliced bread. Thanks for watching.