Most companies and business assume that the best way to promote their product and services is by creating hype. This is far from true. Each business needs to analyze pros and cons of what they are offering before they go ahead and create a marketing strategy. A fast paced wide coverage might garner great results for one but the same might not be true for the other business. Hype marketing isn’t the smartest option when it comes to marketing.

The reason I chose this subject today is due to the meaningless hype created by the new search engine cuil, pronounced “cool.” This so called “Google’s rival search engine” was launched on July 27th 2008. Right after its launch, anywhere you went on the web you could see cuil being talked about as the next big thing in search engines. Some of the thing that caught most users attention was the fact that it had 120 billion pages indexed and the company said that the search results were better than that produced by google. No wonder everyone was talking about the new “to be search giant.” Techcrunch, Cnet, ZDnet, Nytimes, Silicon….no matter where you went there was Cuil being talked about. Well, the hype was meaningless. It has nothing extraordinary to offer the way the company promoted itself.

Being talked about alone doesn’t produce results. Positive results come from positive user experience. One day or so later we could see Cuil all over the web again. The only difference now was that it wasn’t being talked about as the next big thing. Most users found that the searches were not even close to what they were looking for.

I am glad they created as much hype as they did. It certainly wasn’t good for them and their first impression is down the drain among search engine users. However, this certainly is a great case study for marketers and a lesson to learn. They made a mistake, a huge one at that and we need to learn from it.

Hype is good when you know you are promoting something that can live upto what you are making people to expect. Hype is worse when you say one thing and the results are totally the other way around. As of this point I think Cuil has totally wrecked it’s reputation. Just cause it was created by an ex - google engineer doesn’t make it worthy of all the attention, cheap attention for that matter.

If you want to promote your product and services, think. Some products and services require creating hype for attention and some need slow and gradual promotion. In case of Cuil, they should have launched a private beta giving access to as many users as possible. People would talk about it and there would certainly be some promotion as most beta users would bring it to the general web population.

I am sorry to say but Cuil’s marketing approach hit everything else but the nail. So next time you think about creating a hype, remember not all products and services do good with hype marketing. Sometimes gradual marketing is the best way to go. Hype works well when you everything you say about your product or service is true. In Cuil’s case it seem like they deliberately tried to mislead users to try their service with inaccurate information.

Marketing isn’t about gaining mere attention. It is about conveying message to your potential customers/users on how they can actually benefit from your product or service. Creating hype with misleading information will do nothing but create a bad impression and nothing else.

Thanks for the lesson Cuil!