Using Controversy as a Marketing Tactic
Everyone loves to get a little mad.
It’s the fuel that fires the internet. The whole story of the 2016 election, in a lot of ways, was the spread of fake political news that painted each opposing candidate in entirely unflattering lights. They went viral because they provoked a strong emotional response that triggered that old sense of “I must warn the people!” In other words, virality can be – and was – engineered from anger.
The fact is that everybody wants their content to go viral, but we’re mostly too afraid to say and do the kinds of things that are worth sharing. I can write all I want about best practices for inbound marketing, but useful as that is, it’s not exactly gonna set the internet on fire.
We’ve experienced this firsthand; the posts that generate the most traffic from social media aren’t the practical, tactical ones; they’re the Big Hairy Statement ones.
Here’s a great example: “Marketing for Risk Takers.” This blog post generated thousands of visitors from social media for us over three or four months. Intended as a kind of stirring inspirational speech like the one in Braveheart (you know the one), it was all about reminding you that working with an agency is the next step in growing your business, but more than that, it was about not being afraid to be a risk taker. And it set something off.
More than utility, emotional responses drive sharing and resharing very powerfully. And if you want to go viral, you need to be willing to stir something up.
So here are some quick tips you can use to start experimenting with emotionally resonant (read: controversial) content, without risking too much at the outset. (But remember: you wouldn’t be in business if you weren’t comfortable with a little risk.)
Your audience is your audience – that’s not something you should ever forget. You know who you’re writing for: the kind of people you’re out to actually do business with. And that means that you need to talk about something that’s relevant to them and your industry.
That can sound kind of abstract, so let’s get, like, crazy specific. You know Dove? The soap company? They make that really creamy, milky soap that makes your skin really soft? Well, a few years ago, they ran a campaign called Real Beauty. The basic idea was to roll out advertising centering on promoting healthier body images – which wouldn’t exactly have been a super relevant issue to start talking about if Dove’s primary audience was, I don’t know, men over fifty.
Dove tapped into an anxiety and interest of their primary market that was relevant to their overall brand but not directly tied into it, and used that to create a viral campaign that drove itself precisely because it provoked an emotional reaction. And they wouldn’t have been able to find something that would have done that without a thoughtful consideration of their audience.
Back to Dove. The Real Beauty campaign is kind of elegant in its simplicity because they never had to say what their stance was; simply by putting women who weren’t supermodels front and center in their marketing, they were able to make the statement without words: advertising often promotes unrealistic standards of beauty, and we would like to challenge that. It wasn’t the riskiest position to take, but they were one of the first big companies to not only promote realistic beauty standards, but to make it a core part of their brand.
And they backed it up with dramatic imagery. The original “Evolution” spot went viral in 2006 – making it one of the first deliberate attempts to take advantage of YouTube as a marketing platform – primarily on the strength of the dramatic changes between a model's before and (after hours of makeup and digital retouching) after pictures. The point was made – and you could easily see it.
In any attempt at virality, no matter what stance you take, you need to back it up with a source the audience will respect. For Dove, it was a simple matter of unveiling the process of commercial beauty, but it can be anything your audience respects – and the broader your perspective, the better. Look for credible news and data sources that are both accessible and trusted, and use those to power your position with a compelling argument.
As Dove demonstrated, this doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to resonate.
Nobody likes to be hectored at.
There’s a difference between making a point and being a scold, and it can sometimes be a fine line. You want to make sure you forcefully advocate for your position – but never do so in such a way that it seems like, in taking a stance, you’re taking a side. Polarizing and controversial marketing content shouldn’t aim to alienate anybody, and needs to always be respectful of your whole audience as much as possible.
Essentially, it’s the difference between “here is what I believe,” and saying “you are a bad person for disagreeing with me.” Again, the Dove campaign offers a master class in taking a stance without getting personal; at no point does the advertising imply anything about the people who advocate for or promote unrealistic beauty standards; its messaging instead alternates between inspirational and self-reflective snark. It owns its stance, but by keeping the focus on the message it’s promoting, instead of the one it’s refuting, and packaging it as inoffensively as possible, it is able to both communicate the core idea and promote its own brand at the same time.
Nobody gets mad. But the people who it did touch share it, and share it, and share it. Courting controversy led to one of their primary brand identifiers and a marketing campaign that’s gone on now for over a decade.
Because they cracked the virality code. It turns out it’s not about convincing as much as connecting – giving people something they can identify with and simultaneously repromote because it communicates their values and beliefs.
It’s not just controversial.
It’s genius.
