I'm not talking about compromising or dumbing down your product. A very hot hot sauce is remarkable. A sort of hot one is boring, and no one, not even the geeks will talk about it.
Hot-hot-hot sauce is dumbing down your product. What about flavor? Reaching for yet higher levels of capsaicin content is simple, the result primitive. A complex, well balanced flavor is much harder to achieve, and has a much higher reward. (And less excess discomfort the day after.)
I'm a geek and not even particularly knowledgeable about hot sauces, but still, let me talk about Baron's hot sauce. Very plain label. Good treatment of the aged peppers. Tasteful addition of a strong garlic note. IMO, wonderfully flavorful. In contrast, there's "Heinie Hurtin Hot Sauce," which has good comic traction for marketing. Colorful cartoon on the bottle. Nothing remarkable in the bottle, IMO. (No, I'm not an expert, all of this comes from eating at a neighborhood burrito place with a selection of 6 hot sauces at any time.)
As always, appealing to the wannabe segment of the fringe is easier, because they have a shaky grasp of the fundamentals and therefore are easier to manipulate with shallow marketing. (The guys who reach for "Heinie Hurtin" for the bragging rights.) The clueful part of the fringe is much harder to reach.
Hot-hot-hot sauce is dumbing down your product. What about flavor? Reaching for yet higher levels of capsaicin content is simple, the result primitive. A complex, well balanced flavor is much harder to achieve, and has a much higher reward. (And less excess discomfort the day after.)
I'm a geek and not even particularly knowledgeable about hot sauces, but still, let me talk about Baron's hot sauce. Very plain label. Good treatment of the aged peppers. Tasteful addition of a strong garlic note. IMO, wonderfully flavorful. In contrast, there's "Heinie Hurtin Hot Sauce," which has good comic traction for marketing. Colorful cartoon on the bottle. Nothing remarkable in the bottle, IMO. (No, I'm not an expert, all of this comes from eating at a neighborhood burrito place with a selection of 6 hot sauces at any time.)
As always, appealing to the wannabe segment of the fringe is easier, because they have a shaky grasp of the fundamentals and therefore are easier to manipulate with shallow marketing. (The guys who reach for "Heinie Hurtin" for the bragging rights.) The clueful part of the fringe is much harder to reach.
Semblance is easy. Substance is hard.