There’s a quiet truth in selling that most polite marketing advice tiptoes around: the bigger and stranger the claim, the easier the sale. Not because people are gullible, exactly, but because attention is the actual product being sold first, and nothing earns attention like a statement that sounds almost impossible.
Think about the ads that actually stop your thumb mid-scroll. They rarely say “good quality, fair price.” They say something like “this pillow cured my insomnia in one night” or “this serum erased ten years off my face.” The claim doesn’t need to be plausible. It needs to be specific enough to sound like a fact and large enough to feel like a miracle. Plausible claims compete with a thousand other plausible claims. Outlandish ones compete with nothing, because nobody else is saying them.
There’s also a strange psychological shortcut at work. A wildly confident claim signals certainty, and certainty reads as competence even when the underlying logic is thin. If a seller hedges — “this may help with some symptoms in some people” — the buyer’s brain treats that as weakness. If a seller declares, flatly, that the product changes everything, the brain treats that as conviction. People don’t fact-check conviction in the moment they’re deciding to buy. They feel it before they reason about it, and by the time the rational brain catches up, the wallet’s already moving.
Outlandish claims also do something subtler: they reframe the entire category. If everyone else selling vitamins says “supports general wellness,” and you say “this is the single most important supplement you will take in your life,” you’ve just made every other product on the shelf look timid by comparison. You’re not competing on the same axis anymore. You’ve redefined what the conversation is about, and that’s an enormous advantage, because now the buyer is comparing your bold promise against everyone else’s modest hedging, not against reality.
None of this requires lying in a way that feels like lying, either. Outlandish claims tend to work best when they’re technically unfalsifiable or so extreme they read as enthusiasm rather than fact. “This changed my life” can’t really be disproven. “Best in the world” is an opinion wearing a fact’s clothes. The seller gets the punch of an absolute claim without the legal exposure of a measurable one, and the buyer gets the emotional permission to believe something extraordinary is finally within reach.
It’s worth being honest about the other side of this, too, because it matters for anyone actually running a business rather than just making a single sale. Outlandish claims are a short-term accelerant, not a foundation. They get the click, but they also raise the stakes of disappointment, invite regulatory scrutiny in regulated categories like health and finance, and burn trust fast once the gap between promise and reality becomes obvious. The seller who leans on hyperbole again and again is usually optimizing for the next transaction, not the next decade. Used carelessly, the very thing that makes a claim persuasive — its size — is also what makes the fallout, when it comes, just as large.
So the claim works. That’s the uncomfortable part. It works because attention is scarce, certainty is persuasive, and extremity is memorable. Whether it’s the right tool depends entirely on whether you’re trying to make a sale today or a customer for years.