Study Report: Why Scams Succeed and Cures Fail (Understanding Hype vs. Value)
- Markus Over
- Aug 5
- 22 min read
Updated: Aug 6
Note: For a less technical, more layperson-friendly version of this article, click here.
On December 1, 2016, a crowd in a Salt Lake City hall listened in anticipation as a booming voice announced through the speakers:
"For those who bravely stand at the crossroads of innovation and enterprise. For those who are prepared to give our children a moral compass and not just a roadmap. For those who wish to leave the planet better than it was when we found it."
The audience was there to witness an exciting new product by one of the most hyped companies of the time: the Nikola One, an upcoming zero-emissions semi-truck by Nikola Corporation that was expected to disrupt the transportation sector. Excitement for these futuristic hydrogen-powered trucks to hit the market was palpable. Over the next few years, huge orders were placed, partnerships announced, and in 2020, Nikola's valuation briefly exceeded that of Ford.
In a promotional video the company released in 2018, they showed their truck driving majestically through the Utah desert. The combination of sunshine, mountains in the distance, and their futuristic truck gliding over the asphalt was designed to leave a powerful impression. But, as it later turned out, that impression was built on sand: the truck was not actually "driving" in the sense that the clip implied – instead, it was rolling down a hill.
This was just one of several tricks the company was accused of playing in its early years in a (highly successful) attempt to create hype way beyond the actual reality of its tech at the time. In 2022, former CEO Trevor Milton was sentenced to four years in prison for fraud (but pardoned later). The company, once valued at over $30 billion, has produced only around 600 trucks over its ten years of existence. That's a tiny fraction of the 35,000-50,000 they were aiming to build per year by 2023. In 2025, they filed for bankruptcy.
This was a case of something with a lot of hype and very little value.
Let's jump back in time to find a case of the opposite. In the 1840s, the Hungarian surgeon Ignaz Semmelweis made a profound discovery that would eventually save many millions of lives. He found that hospital staff disinfecting their hands drastically reduced maternal death rates after birth. But as valuable as his finding was, it was unpopular - it took another twenty years for it to be accepted as standard practice within the medical establishment. Countless women lost their lives during that time as a result of Semmelweis' insight not being taken seriously.
This was a case of something with a lot of value and very little hype.
These examples illustrate a more general phenomenon: that producing value is not the same as producing hype (e.g., by achieving fame or widespread excitement). This raises the question: "Why do hype and value so often come apart?" In this article, we'll explore this question and offer two insights:
A new 'mental model' about hype and value to help you understand what causes success and failure (of ideas and products)
the results of a study we ran to better understand how hype and value relate.
We believe that understanding hype and value can help people get a better grasp on how the world works and how to help make sure that valuable things succeed.
The Hype-Value Model
The above examples illustrate an important distinction: that the value of something—say a product, idea, or organization—can move independently from the hype that surrounds it. In an ideal world, these would be closely aligned: the more valuable something is, the better its reputation and the more excitement people have about it. But if hype and value are decoupled, then it becomes worthwhile to think about what this means.
First, what exactly do we even mean by "hype" and "value"? In the scope of this article, as well as the research that we'll get into later, we use the terms as follows:
Hype describes the amount that people desire a thing, talk about a thing, find it cool, find it exciting or amazing, or think they will get social status by having it or being associated with it. Roughly, it's how "cool" or "exciting" people find a thing.
This definition is an operationalization of a folk concept, not intended as a precise conceptual analysis. It points to a bundle of features related to hype, but there may well be others. On the other hand:
Value describes the amount that a thing produces real tangible value in the world by helping people get what they truly want (other than social status, excitement, and the feeling of being cool)—that is, the amount that it provides people with their intrinsic values.
This definition picks out the set of all things that people value intrinsically and then removes from that set all the things that fall under the definition of hype. That's because, according to the theory we outline below, hype-related value is special because it accelerates success in a special way.
Both hype and value have the potential to be positive, neutral, or negative. Let's look at a few examples for different combinations of the two:
It can be tricky to quantify hype and value "objectively", so your judgment on these may vary. But we hope these examples help illustrate how hype and value can sometimes differ significantly. The common cold is something almost nobody likes and that causes a lot of harm, while Pizza is something most people like and enjoy. In those two cases, hype and value are well aligned. But in other cases, like when it comes to Ponzi schemes or broccoli, hype and value can oppose each other.
Remember our two cases from the beginning of this article:
Nikola, the overhyped zero-emissions truck start-up that turned out not to have the tech or production capacity it claimed, and
Semmelweis' life-saving yet unpopular insights about hand hygiene in hospitals.
We argue that these two examples are indicative of a more general phenomenon: that for a thing's sustained success, both hype and value are important.
Hype and value can help us understand success. But what do we mean by success? Again, this is a folk concept with lots of different senses. The operationalization we're working with points to affecting the world at scale – whether that's in adoption, revenue, cultural influence, or positive impact on people.
In the case of Nikola: they seemingly invested a lot of effort into building hype for their (supposed) technology, but that hype was nowhere close to reality. It carried them for several years, but they eventually collapsed in disgrace.
And as for hand hygiene, the lack of (or even negative) hype around it curtailed its impact for decades, and the immense potential value it had was not sufficient during that time to truly affect the world. Fortunately, hand hygiene eventually gained the attention and public support it deserved. But far from every valuable idea out there is as lucky, and many disappear into irrelevance.
In this article, we're offering what we think is a useful heuristic for understanding and predicting the relationship between hype, value, and success. We call it the Hype-Value Model of Success. According to this theory:
Hype and value are generally important predictors of success
Each one contributes to success by itself (represented in the equation below by "Hype + Value")
But the combination of both produces interaction effects that make success even more likely (represented in the equation below as “(Positive Hype × Positive Value)”).
Long-term success may often require a sufficient amount (which would depend on context) of both
Although the relationship between them is obviously complicated and nuanced, and varies with context, here's one way to roughly express the idea of our theory:
Success ≈ Hype + Value + (Positive Hype × Positive Value) + Other Effects
Or, in words: Having only hype and only value both can sometimes bring some success—at least for some time. But it's really the combination of both that makes the biggest difference, represented above by "Positive Hype × Positive Value". When a product, organization, or idea brings positive value to the world, and people can also get excited about what they are providing (e.g., viewing it as cool or as high-social status to affiliate with), then the hype can be a real driver toward it affecting the world.
You may wonder why we're distinguishing "Hype" and "Positive Hype" as well as "Value" and "Positive Value" in this formula. The reason is mostly a mathematical one: if we assume that both hype and value can also be negative, then a direct product of the two would imply that negative hype and negative value multiply to a positive product. So with the "positive" modifier, we mean to say that we limit this product to the positive parts of hype (i.e., what's the overall hype level among people who have a positive stance towards the thing?) and the positive parts of value (i.e., for all the individuals who benefit from the thing, what's the overall level of value produced?).
Insofar as this model is true, it leads to an unfortunate but important conclusion: there are probably many things out there that (could) create a lot of genuine value, but which will never truly "make it" because they lack hype. It also means that people who focus exclusively on producing value for the world but neglect building any hype (e.g., excitement or coolness) around their ideas may struggle to have their ideas succeed — even though these are often precisely the people that we would most want to succeed.
Of course, reality is complex, and you can very likely find examples that don't match the above formula or this general idea. We don't claim that this formula applies all of the time. We rather mean this as a heuristic to drive home the point that focusing only on one out of hype and value is likely often a mistake, and if you want something to succeed in this world, then you often need at least some of both. It's usually not enough to focus on value creation alone; you also have to get people excited about it or convince them to care. We believe that most of one's efforts should ideally go into value creation (because that's what leads to your success having a positive and meaningful impact), but that if hype is fully neglected, it can impair a project's chance of success.
Fiction books provide good examples. There are absolutely wonderful books of fiction that barely anyone has ever read. A clear example of this was A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Toole failed to even get it published during his lifetime. Only through his mother, Thelma Toole, making it her mission to get it published — essentially trying to create the hype it deserved through perseverance — did it come to be known to the world. And, remarkably, it ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize!
On the other end of the spectrum, there are books that receive tremendous attention, excitement, and fame before publication, and even sell numerous copies, only to be panned by both audiences and critics upon release for their low quality.
But is it really true that hype and value are decoupled? That is, is it actually common for things to have hype without much value, value without much hype, and everything in between? We investigated this in a recent study.
Our Hype-Value Study
What would you say is more valuable: vitamin pills, kindness towards strangers, or "buy now, pay later" services? And which of these carries more hype?
We recently ran a study to gain a better understanding of hype and value for a wide range of items, including these three, based on the judgments of a US audience. And according to our data, kindness towards strangers is the most valuable of the three, followed by vitamin pills, with "buy now pay later" services coming in third. As far as hype is concerned, all three got similar scores. More details on these and many more items will follow later – feel free to skip these next few paragraphs and jump straight to Results by Category if you're primarily interested in our findings.
For this study, we evaluated the ratings of 327 study participants (recruited using our study participant platform, Positly, and implemented using our survey-builder platform GuidedTrack), each of whom rated a subset of 185 different items from categories such as lifestyle, tech, and culture. We asked each participant to rate the overall hype level of each given item and the value that item provides, both on a -3 to 3 scale (after carefully defining hype and value for them, and ensuring they understood the definitions). This left us with a dataset of over 50,000 individual ratings, which, combined with some demographic information that we additionally asked participants about, allowed us to identify many patterns and relations.
We then adjusted the data to reflect the ratings of the "average American"—what a hypothetical person of average age, average political conservatism/progressivism, and "average gender" (i.e., the midpoint between average responses of women and men) would say. While no person like this actually exists, it corrects for any way that our sample differs from average Americans in terms of these demographics. We'll mark the charts and tables that make use of that adjusted data as "demographically adjusted".
Throughout this section, we'll use that data to discuss:
The average hype & value ratings for many of the items in our study
The least and most controversial items
The difference in ratings between liberals and conservatives
Results by Category
Let's start with the results of the items we selected for each of five categories: Lifestyle, Tech, Media, Academia, and Household Items.
As you can see in the charts below, Value is on the x-axis and Hype is on the y-axis. Both were rated on a scale of -3 to 3. The labels are mostly placed in the chart such that their center is at the point in the hype-value space that our demographic-adjustment resulted in. Some labels had to be moved slightly to avoid the text from overlapping, in which case a thin line indicates the real location.
Furthermore, we color-coded the coordinate system to differentiate between three areas:
In yellow: things that are overhyped, where the hype of an item notably exceeds its value
In green: the zone where hype and value align closely, i.e., those items where hype appears to have a roughly "appropriate" level, compared to the value they provide
In purple: everything underhyped, containing things that are much less popular than their value would warrant
And, as a reminder: the rating for each label is at the center of the label, except when there's a line pointing to a specific point.
Lifestyle:
Out of eating vegetables, watching videos on TikTok, and the common cold, which one would you think is most and least valuable? And which one is associated with the most or the least degree of hype? Take a guess and see if you agree with our study data.
As we see, eating vegetables appears on the very right—it's seen as highly valuable, but is lacking hype (with an average hype score close to 0, indicating people don't have very strong feelings of excitement about vegetables). Watching videos on TikTok appears towards the top-middle: neutral value, but a lot of hype. Seemingly, people get excited about TikTok, when it may not provide as much value as the excitement would indicate. And lastly, the common cold is, understandably, rated as having both negative value (it's actively harmful) and negative hype.
Of course, given the study design, we're not measuring true "value" or "true" hype - it's best to think of these as evaluations of people's perceptions of value and hype for different items (once they have had those concepts clearly explained).
We also observe some broader trends:
Many healthy activities that are not considered to be very fun, such as daily walks, stretching, eating vegetables, biking, running, lifting weights, or getting 8 hours of sleep, ended up in the valuable-but-underhyped region
Tanning and tattoos were rated as less valuable than popular (i.e., overhyped)
Some pairs of terms that are in some sense quite similar, such as sex and orgasms, or lip fillers and plastic surgery, cluster together, lending some credibility to the robustness of our data
Next let's look at how valuable/hyped people perceive companies and tech to be.
Companies and Tech:
Out of Amazon, Bitcoin, and Wikipedia, which do you think is more overhyped and which is more underhyped than the others? In other words, do you think the hype of these entities is broadly aligned with the value they provide, or do they get more or less hype than they would deserve?
We find that Wikipedia is borderline underhyped, while Bitcoin is slightly overhyped, with Amazon sitting comfortably between them (though all three are not far from each other).
Interestingly, the vast majority of companies and tech ideas we covered did end up in the "positive value, positive hype" quadrant—including not only Amazon and Bitcoin, but also others that tend to face a lot of scrutiny, like Meta and Tesla.
But what about famous people and media organizations?
Celebrities and Media:
One interesting feature of these results is that this is the chart with the lowest span on the Value axis. While Breaking Bad, Eminem, or WhatsApp, among others, are rated as valuable, none of these items reaches a value considerably larger than 1 on our -3 to 3 scale. This is not to say that nobody found them more valuable, but at least our hypothetical "Average American" didn't.
Academia and Culture:
In the realms of academic and social ideas, we observe that the underhyped region is quite crowded, while the overhyped region is entirely empty. Philosophy, physics, math, psychology, medicine: all undoubtedly valuable, but they wouldn't win a popularity contest.
Household Items and Goods:
All these household items and goods were judged to have positive hype, with broccoli being the only exception that just barely ended up with a negative hype rating. At the same time, it is rated to be among the most valuable of all these items!
Looking at different potato-based forms of food, our participants judged that regular potatoes are underhyped, while potato chips and French fries are overhyped, and potato salad sits in between in the zone of appropriate hype.
Finally, if you're a dog person and ever end up in a debate about whether cats or dogs are the better pets, it appears our data is (weakly) on your side – as dogs were evaluated to have a bit more value and a bit more hype than cats.
Zooming Out
Looking at these five charts together, a few things stand out:
First, the majority of items are in the top-right quadrant, that of high value and high hype. Indeed, 84% of our items fall into that quadrant, with only 3% in the "positive value, negative hype" quadrant, 4% in "negative value, negative hype", and 9% in "negative value, positive hype".
Naturally, this depends in large part on the selection of items we made for our study. But it still lends some support to our success formula from earlier: we only chose items that have a good chance of being known by almost everybody, to ensure our study participants would be able to provide meaningful judgments. In that sense, we basically chose items that are in some sense "successful", or at least widely known, and we attempted to include a very wide range of items. And the fact that, out of all these items, the vast majority have both positive value judgments and positive hype aligns well with the claim that having both may contribute to success.
If, instead, we count the items based on our three color-coded zones of overhyped, underhyped, and appropriately hyped, we find that 19% fall into the overhyped zone, 20% into the underhyped zone, and for the remaining 61%, these are relatively aligned (based on considering a difference of up to ±1 as an "appropriate" level of hype for any given value score). So, on our 7-point scale, hype and value end up more than one point apart for a total of 39% of items.
We get to a similar conclusion when we throw all our data points together into one big scatter plot and look for the overall correlation between hype and value:
We find that the correlation is 0.23 (with a p-value of 0.0012)—positive, but only modestly so. This shows that there is a little bit of alignment between hype and value, indicating that, in our dataset, the hype around something gives us, at least statistically, a little information about its value, but they are still largely decoupled. However, it is worth noting that the correlation of hype and value for items conditioned on them being successful (or widely known) tells us little about the correlation of hype and value in general (see also the section on selection effects in this article for more on this), so we need to be careful with generalizing this finding too far.
A positive takeaway here is that things with hype often do have value (at least as far as random people evaluating them is concerned). So when something has a lot of hype, it may at least be worth looking into. But at the same time, try not to get carried away by hype, as any given case may be similar to the 19% of our data points where value was notably lower than the hype would indicate (especially given that this percentage is even higher when you look specifically at items with high hype scores; for instance, if we filter for all our study items with a hype score of 1.5 or more, then the share of them that are overhyped doubles to 38.5%).
Controversial Items
Obviously, participants didn't all agree on the hype and the value of each thing we asked them to rate. For some things, participants' answers were very spread out (indicating a high amount of disagreement). For others, their answers were closely clustered together (indicating agreement). We measured the spread of their answers in standard deviations, and we describe things as "more controversial" when they have a larger standard deviation and "less controversial" when they have a smaller standard deviation.
This means that any item can be controversial in three ways:
Participants' hype scores for the item were very spread out
Participants' value scores for the item were very spread out
Participants' scores for hype and value were both very spread out
So, can you guess whether (and if so, how) the following items were controversial?
Alcohol
Designer clothes
The United States
Nature
Note that, for this, we used our actual study data without any demographic adjustment.
In the table below, we're also providing a small heatmap for each of the four terms, with each column showing one number for Value (from -3 to 3) and each row showing one number for Hype (also from -3 to 3), showing you how many study participants gave each hype and value rating to.
Hype | Value | |
Least Controversial | Designer clothes The hype of designer clothes was the least controversial of the hype scores, and it was also judged to be very highly hyped on average (+2.27 on a scale of -3 to 3). Hype mean: +2.27 Hype disagreement: 0.88  | Nature The value of nature was the least controversial of the value scores, and it was also judged to be very highly valued on average (+2.68 on a scale of -3 to 3). Value mean: +2.68 Value disagreement: 0.61  |
Most Controversial | The United States The hype of the United States was the most controversial of the hype scores. Hype mean: +0.51 Hype disagreement: 1.76  | Alcohol The value of alcohol was the most controversial of the value scores. Value mean: -0.62 Value disagreement: 1.82  |
The Nature example is particularly striking: the vast majority of users agree that nature deserves a "3" on the value scale. But there is disagreement about the hype around nature, with people rating its hype about evenly from 0 to 3.
Hype Driven Domains
While it's not reflected in our charts, some domains of life are especially prone to hype, like bottled water, collectibles, new fashion trends, new health trends, and supplements. So it's worth being careful about taking hype seriously in these domains in particular. Water brands typically have little-to-no way to differentiate based on value, so their most significant differentiation tends to come from hype. While lots of people collect just for themselves, prices for collectibles are fundamentally driven by hype (as well as scarcity). Fashion trends are almost by definition hype related (since what makes them a trend is that they aren't a long-lasting aesthetic preference). Health science moves slowly, so most new health trends are a speculative idea unlikely to be correct, or a repackaged old idea. And supplements largely don't work (with a few notable exceptions), meaning that hype drives most of that market as well.
Political Polarization
Finally, we also looked into what a person's political leaning tells us about how they assess the hype and value of different items. To do so, we used the regression model from our demographic adjustment to predict the judgments of an (otherwise "average") fully conservative person to those of a fully progressive one. The two charts below show the results, where we filtered for exactly those items where the overall disagreement between both sides (about both hype and value) was highest.
First, looking at items that progressives systematically value more than conservatives:
One interesting detail of this chart is that, while we selected for items where progressives assigned higher Value than conservatives, it also happens to be the case that for every single one of the ten items, progressives estimated the Hype to be lower. You might consider coming up with some hypotheses for what explains this pattern, and then think about what these would imply for the next chart, where we look into the most polarizing items valued by conservatives.
Looking at the types of items we find, they're not very surprising: most of these are clearly politically divisive terms or figures, like Joe Biden, social justice, and vaccines.
Again, we find an unsurprising selection of politically divisive items, such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk (and two of his companies), Joe Rogan, and Fox News. The divergence in value judgments is much higher in this chart, though, than in the previous one.
We also find that, again, all ten points received higher hype ratings by conservatives than by progressives. It appears to be a general pattern in our data that conservatives tended to assign higher Hype scores than progressives. It's unclear to us whether this is in some way caused by our selection of items, or if conservatives systematically use the Hype scale in a different way from progressives (or if there's some other reason for this pattern). But whatever explains it, the pattern is very robust. In the following chart, we see the predicted Hype scores for all 184 study items, each one showing a red bar for the conservative score and a blue bar for the progressive one:
For 165 (90%) out of these 184 items, the conservative hype score exceeds the progressive one, and only for 19 (10%) of them is this relationship reversed. At the same time, there is a clear correlation between their scores (r = 0.72). So it appears that the systematically higher hype scores of conservatives are not caused by item-specific disagreement, but rather by a general shift of the scale.
Limitations
The theory we've advocated in this article claims that:
Hype and value each contribute to success on their own, but the combination of both produces interaction effects that make success even more likely
The contribution of hype and value to success is such that success (particularly long term) is much less likely without at least some positive amount of both hype and value.
We believe this theory, as well as the research presented above, provide some valuable insights (otherwise we wouldn't be talking about them!), but they do come with some caveats. As is so often the case, reality is too messy to be cleanly captured by a simple model. Two simplifications are particularly worth pointing out:
1) Complex distributions: First, we have simplified average judgments about hype and value by representing them as single numbers that are either positive, zero, or negative. A more accurate way to think of these is as distributions. For instance, Instagram had an average Value rating of 0.37 from our study participants. But clearly, it's not "mildly valuable" for every single user. While many may indeed benefit from it, some users may, e.g., get addicted, experience bullying, or in other ways get strongly negatively affected by the app. And the same is true for almost every item—experiences differ, and the value a person derives from something can vary a lot.
Hype may be even more extreme in this regard than value: we often encounter polarization, where one group of people thinks of something or somebody as extremely cool & desirable, while another group thinks the opposite. Is Jeff Bezos cool or uncool? This very much depends on who you're asking: his average hype value in our study was 0.08, yet only 15 out of 157 participants who rated him chose a hype score of 0, with 73 attributing positive hype to him, and 69 choosing negative hype, as can be seen in the following chart:
For something or someone to be successful, it's probably less important for the average hype to be high than whether some sufficiently large group of people is very hyped. So, even when the "average American" assigns 0 (or even negative) hype to something, it may still be wildly successful simply because some part of the population is sufficiently excited about it to support it or invest in it.
2) Measuring value is difficult: And second, while we can measure hype pretty well, as this is inherently based on people's opinions, the same is not true for value: we've defined value (for the purposes of this study) in such a way that means there is an objective-but-unmeasurable fact of the matter about the value of any given item. That's because there is an objective fact of the matter about how much any item helps people to attain more of their intrinsic values, but it's not something we can easily and reliably measure directly. Instead, we have to rely on people's judgments. And people can disagree very strongly about the value of something. To name one such case, here's the assessment of what our study participants think of the value of X.com (formerly Twitter). This was one of the items from our study where the disagreement (as measured by standard deviation) about value was particularly high:
As you can see, judgments are all over the place and far from a consensus. We find about equally many study participants who think X is severely harmful as people who think it provides significant benefits to the world.
Throughout this article, when we discussed "value," we mostly conceptually referred to the "actual" value something provides. But we have no way of directly measuring that value, and so we approximate "actual value" with what the wisdom of the crowd says about its value (based on those who participated in our study). These are better thought of as "perceptions of value" than actual value.
Putting it All Together
Throughout this article, we've seen that hype and value really are fairly independent properties, at least as they are represented by the ways we have defined and studied them. For any person, organization, or idea, the hype that surrounds it can differ a lot from the value it provides to the world.
We've also seen that 84% of our studied items and persons—all of which can be viewed as "successful", given we selected items that all study participants are likely to know about—fell into the positive hype and positive value quadrant. This observation doesn't prove causality, and there are many opportunities for further research in this area, from randomized controlled trials to longitudinal studies on the success of different projects to more in-depth surveys, similar to research we've conducted on startup founders and the predictors of their success.
It's probably not controversial to claim that pure hype is typically not sustainable, and rarely, if ever, a good business strategy. But we also discussed a different angle: while value may be what many ultimately care most about, it seems to be the case that some degree of hype may well be necessary for most products, projects, and companies to succeed. In particular, being "allergic to hype", as many idealistic people are, may lead to missed opportunities and to worthwhile ideas not living up to their potential. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where valuable things always spread and succeed, but unfortunately, we don't. Hype is often needed to realize the value.
It would be going too far to argue that Ignaz Semmelweis should have done anything differently from what he did. And it's not at all obvious how he could have made his idea more appealing to those who didn't want to accept it. But at the very least, it seems that the lack of positive hype around his insight among the medical establishment at the time was one of the main reasons why it took so many years for things to change.
The good news here is that hype and value don't have to be a significant trade-off, and you may be able to find ways to build some hype without having to compromise on the value of what you're creating. For example, finding ways to package what you have to share in more engaging (but still accurate) narratives may help it to resonate with people. And looking for ways to reach the right people – those who would benefit the most from something – can similarly make a big difference. In that way, hype can turn from something deceptive with a bad connotation into a useful tool that makes value legible rather than artificially inflating it.
