Free essays and podcast episodes are published every Tuesday, and paid subscribers receive an additional essay and episode on Thursdays.
In the world of marketing, “hyping” something means promoting it so that it seems more desirable than it actually is according to more concrete, utility-based measurements of desirability.
In other words, I could sell you a hammer at a price that takes into account the utility of that hammer, alongside the cost to make it, the materials of which it is made, and enough profit that I’m incentivized to make more hammers in the future.
Or, I could make the hammer seem more desirable by hyping it up: taking photos of celebrities holding the hammer, designing it in such a way that it stands out from all other hammers on the shelf, or not putting the hammer on any shelves and instead making it seem exclusive by only producing a small number of them. I might also stamp it with a logo or other brand element that is associated with other highly desirable objects and ideas.
Hype can artificially increase the perceived value of something without increasing the literal value of it, according to every other metric we might measure it against.
It achieves this by increasing the consumer’s sense of exclusivity, manipulating our perception of scarcity, stoking our desire to stand out or fit in, attaching itself to preexisting, desirable concepts and icons, and stimulating our sense of hope and possibility.
Hype, as a marketing approach, has been used by entertainment wizards like P.T. Barnum, entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, and political professionals like Rachel Maddow and Donald Trump.
Though it can be found pretty much everywhere, there’s a particularly strong tradition of hype within the world of technology entrepreneurship, as evidenced by the language used to describe new technology-focused offerings.
A cultural lingua franca emerged in the post-microprocessor Silicon Valley business landscape, and this trend has since become a global modus operandi for folks flogging their innovations to entities with the monetary resources to fund their next steps.
This flavor of hype has seemingly carried over to other, adjacent industries, as well.
Research indicates, for instance, that scientific publishing has fallen prey to the slow creep of hype-focused language similar to that found in tech startup press releases—an increase of 880%, according to one study that looked at PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014—with scientific papers dripping with optimistic and, at times, misleading language that’s similar in tone and slant to an ambitious tech startup’s promotional slide deck.
This may be the consequence of economic incentives: click-centric revenue models have made attention-grabbing headlines a near-necessity for many journalistic entities: even those with sparkling reputations for the integrity of their work, and even those that specialize in publishing the results of scientific research.
Whatever the cause, though, this shift in presentational focus can change our own expectations and behaviors over time, because hype tends to grab us by the emotions rather than the intellect, and the subconscious parts of our brains that seek meaningful information in our environments are drawn toward hype-amplified data to the exclusion of non-hyped information.
To get any attention at all, then, even the entities that’re publishing raw numbers and unsurprising study findings may come to couch their work in linguistic fluffery. And over time, the work that isn’t hyped disappears—because it’s not published, and because our brains filter it out—and our default sense of how people communicate further shifts toward a relatively more-hyped resting state.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things and my daily publication, Yesterday’s Newsletter.
The Brain Lenses podcast is available at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.