Under Promise and Over Deliver. (Another blog post about steak…)
We’ve all heard (or read) the advice, “sell the sizzle and not the steak.” And this is good advice to follow, as long as you’ve got a great “steak” to sell.
But, I think many online marketers are misinterpreting that saying to mean that as long as you “hype the sizzle”, the meat isn’t important. That kind of thinking will get you in trouble.
Sure, you can fool people into buying (for a while.) But, you simply can’t build a healthy, long term business around the “all sizzle and no steak” model. After all, even if you sold them the steak by focusing on the sizzle, they are still eventually going to try and take a bite and discover that you ripped them off.
As a copywriter I’ve heard other, well respected copywriters say things like…
“The cure for a bad product is good copy.”
Or, “There is no product flaw so great, that outstanding copy can’t fix it.
Or, “the product isn’t important, just focus on writing great copy.”
The problem with this kind of thinking is… When your customer buys your product or service based on the power of your outstanding copy, and then your product fails to live up to the “hype” and expectations you’ve built up in your readers mind, you will lose any chance of ever selling that customer anything else.
Your lifetime customer value will suffer greatly and your total profits will be FAR less than they could be had you “under promised and over delivered”.
As an ethical and long term focused marketer, if you focus your efforts on delivering MORE value and results than your buyers expect, you will blow past your “all sizzle and no steak” competition like they are standing still.
Happy Testing!
Eric Graham
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April 4th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Your posts keep making me hungry!
April 8th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
[...] Recently, I set out to find information about product creation and I found a post by Eric Graham's, titled Under promise and Over Deliver. This post really drives home this philosophy. [...]