…is the word Fortune magazine (and former NY Times) gadget guru Peter Lewis uses to describe the much-hyped birthchild of Apple & Motorola with Cingular as its midwife. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, and even vlogged about it on this blog.
With all the hype surrounding the boffo news conference to introduce this new cell phone that also plays 100 iTunes, little can be done to sway the jaded critical press if the product doesn’t deliver. In fact, too much advance hyperbole can have a deleterious impact on the tenor of a product’s critical reviews.
Marketers might be better served with the element of surprise, as was the case with the Nano, an elegant wafer-like surprise bi-product of the same over-hyped news conference. As in our business, there’s much to be said about under promising and over delivering.