and Truth //
The candidate for reelection tells the truth. It’s what I did and I want to do it again. Hope is offered by the candidate who appears out of nowhere. We cannot know, but we can imagine.
Kickstarter gives hope. There are no reviews or tests. Just a promise.
Book publishers buy hope, so do venture capitalists. The typical commercial investor, on the other hand wants to repeat what has already been done.
Some pharmaceuticals have specific results with known statistics.
Simple example: In the early days of my career, as a creator and producer of non-fiction titles, I included completed layouts in my proposals. The publisher’s input meant that I couldn’t offer anything as good at this point. It was better to provide a blank sheet than what we would produce. On the other side, I could not simply say that the content would be worth publishing – we had to provide examples and a track history.
There’s no such thing as the absolute truth when we’re discussing the future. We base our hopes on the past.
There’s always more than hope. Hope is always based on what has come before. It could be a clue, hint or past track record.
It’s hard for a marketer to decide when they have enough experience, but not too much.
And for the voter/consumer/investor, we get to choose what we seek, and what we offer. It’s not more likely that we will succeed if we confuse truth with hope.
