To answer this this question, we examine the case of prolonged hype, namely that surrounding drone technology and its potential commercial and civil market applications.

We tracked hype in the market for commercial drone applications through projections in investor media collected through the database Factiva. In addition, we triangulated this with patenting to observe whether firms hedged their bets on the future potential of the technology as well as which firms were involved in drone-related patenting. We found that despite the fact that commercial uptake of civil and commercial drone technology continuously underperformed projections across more than a decade, excitement, expectations, and attentions only increased with no signs of a hype burst. To understand how it was possible to sustain hype across a series of disappointed expectations across more than a decade, we leveraged an archival data set of articles from the central drone trade magazine, AUVSI in the years 2010-2020 (Hoffman, 1999).

We found that proponents of drone technology sustained the excitement, attention, and expectations through three distinct discursive processes. First, we found that hype took the form of a causal narrative of what a potential commercial take-off would require. In the absence of progress, a significant mechanism underlying the sustaining of the hype was to continuously alter this causal narrative in the collective vision around the technology. In addition, we found that drone advocates continuously altered the scale and the scope for the potential of drone technology as well as continuously offering isolated, examples of sales in the absence of growth in statistical terms. Finally, drone advocates continuously conveyed signals of growth that were agnostic to any actual commercialization, such as new partnerships, investments, or support from other third-party stakeholders.

Our findings advance the recent literature on hype and hype management by proposing a theory of sustained hype. The dominant view on hype in the literature is that hype is rapid and treacherous as it, after rising and, in light of disappointment, declines rapidly. We found that hype can be sustained over longer periods of time, even decades, as advocates reformulate the collective vision to encompass disappointment into a narrative of an inevitable take-off.