Sales Slogans - mostly misleading hype

We are constantly bombarded with sales slogans, jingles, hype and other misleading information about products and services.

It's a problem for consumers because many of us believe what we read and what we're told. How silly of us!

The main problem nowadays is there's plenty of money spent on better hype for the product or service, when that money would be much better spent improving the product or service.

It's appropriate to ask, "what can we do about it?"

I'd like to suggest we refuse to "buy into" the hype and then refuse to buy the product or service, but I certainly wouldn't hope for such a response at anything other than an individual level.

So, let's proceed with identifying hype and misleading sales slogans, and let you decide your own course of action.

Identifying Hype

It's relatively easy to identify hype. If it's on a billboard or product packaging, it's probably hype. If it's part of a commercial advertisement, it's probably hype. If the salesperson's lips are moving, it's probably hype.

Get it? Sales slogans and hype are everywhere. Don't trust much of what you see, hear or read. Instead, trust what you hear from others who own the product or have used the service.

Nowadays buzz words seem to be clearly indicative of hype. Have you heard the word solutions used to describe products, services and businesses? It's everywhere. Computers and printers aren't what they used to be. Today, they're small business solutions, home business solutions, and productivity solutions.

How about this business about products and activities being extreme in nature. It was born from "extreme sports" where athletes and contestants engage in activities that are often life and health threatening. Now, we have extreme batteries, extreme pizza, extreme businesses, extreme underarm odor and wetness protection. I haven't seen extreme ice cream, but I'm willing to wait for it.

A throw back to the 1970s that still exists today is the little suggestion on miniature candy bars that they are the fun size as if other sizes aren't nearly as much fun.

Another favorite of mine is incredible as in savings, value, selection and performance. Outstanding would have been a better word because incredible is how I view all of these sales slogans and hype.

Silly Slogans

Here are other bits and pieces of sales slogans and how I make fun of them. This is just a small list. We'd need multiple pages to address all that we might run into.

• fast acting - because we know you're impatient
• high quality - according to our standards anyway
• heavy duty - named that way because the other cheap crap we sold you broke the first time you used it
• professional quality - even though professional wouldn't be caught dead using our product
• MVP - it's a sports acronym of some sort and it helps sell the vehicle, but don't ask us to tell you with a straight face what it really means
• extra - we know it means "other than" but we use it because most consumers think it means "very"
• reserve - a term we use to make you think we held it just for you, or just for whoever happens to buy it first
• sales event - something to make you think our sales are really worth attending
• limited time offer - unless we don't get the sales we expect, then we'll make a special extension of the offer
• on sale now - yes, and any other time it's simply for sale
• value - yeah, that's what you say
• reduced price - just after you jacked the price up I suppose

You can see that many times the words and slogans used are intentionally misleading. It's something we need to be aware of so we can brush it off and focus on what is really important to us - do we need it or want it, and does it have true value for us.

I keep waiting for a cookie manufacturer to come out with a sales slogan like "No one has ever died from eating our cookies!" It would be just as meaningful as the rest of the stuff we're exposed to.

Anyway, try your best to look beyond all of this salesmanship and get focused on the product or service for what it really is and what it really does.

And, the next time you see a hammer packaged and sold as a "manual repeating multi-fastener fastening system" just walk the other way. Those type of sales slogans and their associated products deserve to be ignored entirely - until they offer us consumers a little money to take the poorly selling product off of their hands.

Done with Sales Slogans, back to Money Making Scams