Every manufacturer has a claim it believes and cannot show.
Stronger. Lasts longer. Holds up when the other one fails. Your buyer has heard the same words from everyone who quoted the job.
So they discount all of it. In a 2023 TrustRadius survey of 1,604 technology buyers, 74 percent named product demos among the most influential sources in their decision. Only 15 percent said they consulted vendor marketing materials at all.
Those were software and hardware buyers, not plant managers. Anyone who has sold equipment will still recognize the pattern. People believe what they watch happen.
When the value is inside the product
Shield Security Doors, a Brooklyn company that manufactures in High Point, builds residential doors that hold up against forced entry. Three product lines, three levels of protection, all built to look like a normal front door.
That is the whole point of the company, and it made the doors almost impossible to sell. The steel, the reinforcement and the hardware are all inside. From the sidewalk, all three look the same.
When a buyer cannot see the difference between a $2,000 door and a $10,000 door, the decision comes down to price. Every time.
If the thing that makes your product worth more is hidden, describing it harder will not help. You have to put it under stress and let people watch.
Write the claim as something a stranger can judge
Most claims fail on camera because they are too vague to test. "Built tough" cannot be proven. "Still sealing after ten thousand cycles at full load" can.
Write your claim as one sentence a buyer could check with their own eyes. Then build the test around the failure they actually worry about. For a door, that is somebody getting in. For a fastener, it is the load where the cheaper one lets go.
If a recognized standard covers your product, test to it and say so. Swinging doors have ASTM F476, a test method for how well a door assembly holds off a break in, and the current version is dated 2023. A rating speaks to specifiers. A filmed test speaks to everyone else. The strongest companies have both, and never let one pass for the other.
Proof video ideas that hold up
Hand it to someone who wants it to fail. On May 19th, Shield brought in local Triad SWAT teams to run a real breaching test on three of their doors, with hydraulic tools and explosive breaching charges. Officers who do this for a living, using everything they carry.
Run it at real speed. Keep one camera on the whole attempt with no cuts, so nobody wonders what happened between shots. We ran two cameras plus drones on Shield's breaching sequences.
Show the inside afterward. Cut it open, pull it apart, put the damaged part on a table. That is the moment the hidden value finally becomes visible.
Test it yourself first. Run it privately before the cameras show up. You want to know the result before your buyer does.
Do not fake a second of it
In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled on a shaving cream commercial that showed a razor shaving sandpaper clean. The sandpaper was a prop made of plexiglass with sand on it. Real sandpaper needed about 80 minutes of soaking first. The Court called the undisclosed prop a material deceptive practice.
The FTC's 1984 policy statement on substantiation goes further. If an ad says tests prove something, the Commission expects the company to have at least that level of proof.
The law is the floor. The bigger reason is that buyers can tell. A rehearsed answer sounds rehearsed, and a test run three times looks like it.
So we refused to stage anything for Shield. No scripted lines, no rehearsed answers, no second takes. Between attempts we pulled the officers and Samuel Fish, who runs Shield, aside and asked what they had just seen while it was still fresh.
That is why the strongest line in the film is not Shield's. It is a lieutenant with twenty years of SWAT experience saying these are the toughest doors he has had to breach with his tools, tactics, and technology. Shield could never have written that. They did not have to.
A few months after launch, Samuel put it this way: "We continue to deploy the video front and center. It's opening new opportunities for us and showcasing what we do in a way we could never show previously."
The full story is in the Shield Security Doors case study. Here is how we approach a product testing video, and more on what makes a good industrial product demo video.
The short version
- If the value is inside the product, describing it will not land. Buyers discount what they cannot check.
- Write the claim as one sentence a stranger could judge with their own eyes.
- Hand the product to someone who wants it to fail, and keep one camera on the whole attempt.
- Never stage it. The law is the floor, and buyers can tell anyway.
- Let the witness say the line you could never write yourself.