[1] The advertisement or seller uses such tactics to overwhelm the buyer with explanations, information, and persistence to ultimately create an incentive to purchase the good or service.
Even with small probabilities of success, enough sales can be achieved by attempting conversion on large customer bases to sustain the operation or even generate profits.
Hard sell attempts to bypass all that by using emotional triggers, such as appealing to personal aspirations, creating artificial scarcity, applying compliance principles, and exploiting cognitive biases or fallacies.
The advantage of immediacy plays a large role in the concept of a hard sell and why so many advertisements and salespeople use this type of technique.
In opposition, a soft sell ad, because of its indirectness and subtlety, will allow for a person to have more time to make a decision as to whether or not they would like to invest their money in a product.
Sometimes the pressuring nature that comes along with hard sell tactics can overwhelm a person to the point where they dismiss the sales pitch or turn away from the advertisement altogether.
[citation needed] In addition, a hard sell generates much more buyer's remorse, because the customer did not get enough opportunity or information before sale to balance the value provided with the cost of the purchase.
There is also criticism of hard sell tactics in regards to lack of creativity on the part of advertisements and sellers, which causes the would-be customer to never acquire intrigue towards the product being sold.
A hard sell is usually used when a seller wants their potential customer to do something soon—to make a call, to sign up for a subscription, or to buy a product in person on the spot.