About a decade ago I left a corporate job to make it on my own as a freelance writer. What I failed to think about before I quit was that I needed to actually get people to know who I was so that they would buy from me. I had no idea how to make this happen.
Eventually the fear kicked in, and I started to do a bit of research. I bought a bunch of Idiot’s Guide books and hunkered down to learn about all high-tech marketing tactics of the day. I became convinced myself that if I could just develop the right combination of landing pages, A/B tests, tweets, and sales funnels, the magical Google fairies shower me with clients.
This did not happen.
By this point, I was on the verge of having wiped out my meagre life savings. I always tell people that of you want to come up with a really, really good idea, you should drive yourself to the edge of total desperation.
That was certainly my approach.
How I Embraced Hype and Changed My Life
The solution came to me when I was walking around Manhattan’s Lower East Side to clear my head. I happened to pass by a legendary rock club, which got me thinking bands likes Alice Cooper, the Rolling Stones, KISS, or the Sex Pistols, (and their managers) who were better than practically anyone at getting the word out and building massive audiences.
It occurred to me that none of them thought of themselves as marketers.
What was it about these outcasts, I wondered, that made them so effective?
Rock stars were just one example of a certain kind of character I would come to know all too well. Theatrical impresarios. Old time circus promoters. Propagandists. Mischief-makers of all stripes. Despite vast difference in what they were promoting, these figures people had an understanding of mass psychology that others lacked. I began to these principles to my own work, and committed myself to applying them ethically. And it changed my life.
My new “hype-based” approach helped me finally build a successful copy-writing business, marketing agency, and then an education company. Most recently McGraw Hill published my book on the subject called “The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World’s Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers.”*
A Subtle Approach to Hype
What I love so much about being a professional hype artist is that in continuing to research these figures and experiment with these ideas, I am constantly surprised by how frequently things aren’t what they seem.
For example, I always assumed it would always be the flashy, over-the-top antics that would give self-promoters the biggest impact. Not so. In fact, I’ve become more convinced that it is the subtlest approaches that deliver the biggest rewards.
To illustrate the point, let me discuss a fundamental principle that I’ve seen used time and again by everyone from religious cults to Fortune 100 CEOs.
Let’s say you’ve built your business and/or reputation around the idea of always under-promising and over-delivering. You’ve always assumed that the more you do for your clients, the more they’ll appreciate you. When they ask you to call someone or send something or set something up or write something, you do it without question.
You figure that if you do whatever your clients ask for, they will appreciate your effort, see you as indispensable, and keep paying you with smiles on their faces.
In a rational world, this would make sense. A person contracted you to do something for them, so if you do more of it for the same amount of money, they should be overjoyed.
However, we human beings did not evolve to see the world accurately. We evolved to survive and spread our genes.
What hype artists understand better than the rest of us is that we constantly adapt. We adapt to negative circumstances, of course. But we also adapt to positive developments.
The joy your clients get from all the extra work clients get wears off pretty fast. It quickly becomes the new baseline. As a result, you inevitably stop getting kudos when you over-deliver on your original promises. At the same, time if ever go back to simply delivering on your promises, your clients will feel they’re no longer getting their money’s worth.
It’s not fair. But it is reality.
Fortunately, there’s a way to get around—even benefit from—this quirk of human nature. Any good hype artist would create a structure in which they would provide the frameworks, tools, strategies, tactics, rules, and step actions for their clients to use.
They would work with them to customize all of the above to fit their specific situation. They would stand by their side relentlessly to guide them, advise them, and generate new ideas for them. They would weave your magic into their client’s DNA.
Ultimately, though, the client would be responsible for putting one foot in front of the other and taking the concrete actions that would lead to their own success.
If you were to borrow this approach, what you would find is not only that your clients would be happier, they would get better results.
Ironically, when people own their own outcomes, the changes actually stick. When they can’t shift responsibility, they take responsibility.
The same is true whether you’re a financial advisor, accountant, marketing agency, IT firm, or whatever.
Stop doing work for your clients.
Start doing work with your clients.
Embrace this element of hype, and you might find that you’ll never have an unhappy client again.
Michael F. Schein is the author of “The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World’s Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers“* and the Head Hype Man at MicroFame Media.
*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.