Under-claiming.

‘Subject: ‘IMPORTANT!!’
I didn’t recognise the name of the sender, let’s call her Nadia Johnson.
What could it be?
What have I missed? Is it the bank?
Tax office?
Maybe it’s something good?
A publisher with a huge cheque wanting to turn this blog in to a book? What could it be? Should I be worried? Excited?
Turned out ‘Nadia’ was a student looking for a job.

So it was a kind of trick.
I guess Nadia thought that if she put ‘IMPORTANT!!’ in the subject box I’d read on.
She was right.
But she hadn’t considered how I’d feel by the end of the email – tricked.
So if someone asked me to pick one email from my inbox that wasn’t important, I’d pick that one.
Because she’d forced me to assess its importance.

In advertising, over-claiming is second nature .
It’s easy to get clients to buy it, but hard to get the public…