Believe It or Not?

Half a century ago, I became an ad agency marketing strategist for major brands of big companies like P&G, Coca-Cola Co, and more. One of my roles was to develop and evaluate new product concepts. I usually first screened and refined them using focus groups and then quantitatively rated concepts using Dick Twidt’s “Discriminant Analysis.” His system had consumer respondents rate the key benefit descriptor of new product concepts on three scales: the importance of the promise, its uniqueness, and its believability.

This process seemed to work well. At least it produced results that kept clients happy. But over the next decade, new findings from academic and institutional researchers caused me to question one of the three scales I had come to rely on. These generic researchers found that it was almost impossible to measure the risk of “overpromise.” The more inflated the promise used in these tests, the higher the expectations they created in their test subjects, the more satisfied the subjects were with the subsequent performance of the products they tested.

In short, having your brand’s promise challenge the limits of believability pays. Why? Perhaps it’s due to “the placebo effect.”

And another factor seems at play as well: to give it a fancy name, call it “disconfirmation of negative expectations.” Or a variant of “cognitive dissonance.”” Or simply see it as a typical reaction to “a pleasant surprise.” The best evidence for this effect is an experiment showing that the strongest emotional bonds between people are formed after someone you expected not to like at first exposure proves to be likeable after all.

Many years later I had a chance to test these observations when I came up with a title for a book I had co-authored. Our book was designed to show readers how to more quickly overcome their grief from the loss of an intimate relationship. It’s an important problem, certainly; as the song goes, “breaking up is hard to do.”

The title we chose? “How to Heal a Broken Heart in 30 Days.” Is that an incredible promise? No doubt. Many of those who’ve posted their comments about the book on amazon agree that the title does challenge conventional wisdom about the time needed for love’s wounds to heal.

The result? The book became a best seller. Our editor at Random House refers to it as “a minor classic.” It’s still in print after fifteen years, producing thousands of dollars in royalties each year for both of its authors. I’d say that at least this one test of the merits of overpromise succeeded.