I needed to buy some No More Nails for a small repair, so I headed off to the local DIY shed. After the usual game of ‘can you guess where we keep it’, I managed to find the correct aisle. After discounting the remarkably similar generic products (advertising works especially for those who know very little about DIY), I was left with a choice between Super and Ultra. I just needed to stick a board to a wall so I didn’t need anything super or ultra, I just needed normal. I explained my problem to an assistant and was told that super is the ordinary strength and that ultra is better but in an unexplained way.
I know that marketing is about differentiating your product and in today’s very competitive world this is becoming increasingly difficult but surely we can avoid the use of hyperbole when choosing how we describe simple things.
The addition of hyperbole is just another example of the trend which involves adding a suffix /prefix to everything. For example we had the ‘e-‘ prefix during the first dotcom boom. The arrival of the Apple ‘i’ products saw another meaningless prefix arrive. Currently we have variations on ‘innovation’, ’2.0′, ‘social’, ‘system / solution’ and most recently ‘green / eco’ tagged onto products, services and marketing material. Despite what these people think including the latest word du jour doesn’t actually make their writing, idea or product better. In my experience products or services which use words like these have taken Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby’s advice to "Always get rid of the difficult part in the title".
Products and services that use the words like quality, designer, luxury or professional are often at the bottom end of the market. The over inclusion of these words is often the best indicator that it’s one of things that’s absent. If you’ve got it you don’t need to tell people, it should be obvious.
An example of this trend are "Ultimate Ears Super Pro 5 Professional Quality earphones". These must be truly astounding, two superlatives, two claims to professional status, a 5 (I assume numbers 1 to 4 weren’t deemed to be exciting enough) and a reminder of quality thrown in and all at price, that based on my own audiophile experience, is missing at least one zero.
I’ve come up with some definitions which should help clarify the real meaning of these words
Mega, Ultra, Super etc – ‘our product’s not very interesting but by adding this now it is’
Professional - ‘we charge money for this’ or ‘this one is more expensive’ or ‘it’s cheap but we want you to feel like your getting something better’
Quality – ‘it’s not complete cr*p’
Value – ‘it’s not very good but at least we’re not charging the earth’ or in some cases ‘it’s over priced but we hope you won’t notice’
Innovative - ‘it’s the same as everyone else’s but we’ve made it look different’ or see above definition for Mega etc
Green /eco – ‘we’ve made a minor contribution to saving the world so you can feel better about buying this’
Healthy – ‘we’ve removed some sugar, salt or chemicals not enough to make a difference to your health but enough to claim a reduction on the packet’
i or e prefix / 2.0 suffix - ‘look at how modern we are’
turbo, supercharged etc – ‘you’ll be a real man if you buy this’
system / solution - ‘our product name or description wasn’t long enough so we added another word’
If today’s products are currently so good that they deserve the professional, ultimate or mega tags what happens when someone releases something better. Where are these people going to go next with names? As a suggestion they could follow Sainsbury’s idea from their Basics range and try honesty
Sainsbury’s basics frozen fruit salad – Not fancy fruit, but still really fruity.
Sainsbury’s basics 10 fruit scones -They’re still great tasting scones, just have slightly less fruit.
Flickr photo by takomabibelot