The Pros and Cons of Polarizing Marketing

0:00Alright, so we want to talk about if polarizing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing marketing You spre Really, polarizing means you have a big chunk of people that are for and a big chunk of people that are against, right?

0:21And one example of this might be the Budweiser campaign that was run with Dylan Mulvaney, I believe. And so Dylan Mulvaney is part of the LGBTQ community, and it really polarized the Budweiser community. And that's an example of, we talked about the pros and cons before in the reaction video, but we want to talk about just in general, not related to Budweiser, but just the general, the good and bad around it. When you do polarizing marketing, sometimes you're going to get haters and you're going to get people who love you, but you got to figure out what you're trying to optimize for. So for example, if you're optimizing for revenue, but your revenue tanks, then it failed.

0:57But if you're optimizing for brand awareness, a lot of times polarizing marketing has the best brand awareness from what we've seen. If you look at the Budweiser example, Eric and I were pulling it up on a Google Trends sheet. And if you look at how many people were searching for Budweiser from their latest campaign, if their goal was brand awareness, I think it was what, like 10, 15 times more than normal error. It was something more than 10 times, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, he's nodding his head yes. So you've got to figure out what your goal is. What I found is if you work with a lot of enterprise brands and you're in B2B, polarizing marketing tends to hurt you more than help you.

1:37If you're working in the consumer space, it can help or hurt you. I've seen it more so hurting you in enterprise and B2B, but in B2C, I've seen it more so going 50-50. It can go either way. Yeah. I think sometimes if you feel like your brand is in decline and you have to take a shot, sometimes you gamble and sometimes the gamble works and sometimes the gamble doesn't. That's literally what a gamble is. So you think about in American football, you have a play, which is my favorite play known as the Hail Mary. And the Hail Mary is when you throw the ball up and it goes maybe 50, 60 yards or whatever.

2:14And there's a very little chance of paying off. But when it does pay off, it pays off. And that's how I look at it. It pays off big when it does pay off. Yes. Yeah. The real question is, are you willing to roll the dice? Yeah. And sometimes you need to roll the dice, right? If you feel like your brand's in decline. So let me give you an example here related to American football, actually. I don't know if you remember this one, Neil, but Nike's believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything ads. So this featured Colin Kaepernick when he was doing a stand for social issues. He used to play quarterback for the 49ers.

2:43And it was polarizing because it drew a lot of support, a lot of intense backlash. And Nike got some praise for it, for standing for social justice issues. But Kaepernick himself, this was the gamble that didn't work out for him because when he did all that, and I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but he got, he couldn't find another job in the NFL afterwards because he, another team to play with more so. Yeah. He decided to kneel during the national anthem. Right. And so people were like, Oh my God, he's disrespecting the flag or whatever. And so I think it worked for Nike, but the sacrifice here was Colin Kaepernick.

3:17If I'm not mistaken, my father-in-law was telling me this, he served, but he was telling me the NFL. And I don't know how true this is, but I was looking it up. A lot of the sports teams actually you get paid to play the national anthem? Did you know that? Did you know that it's like a$10 million ad? So when the air force flies over and all that, like the military being included in there, that's basically the armies or the military's marketing campaign. They're paying for that. But yeah, so it's like polarizing. It can do well for you. It can do poorly for you. You kind of don't know unless you try it out.

3:52But here's the thing. If things are going well with your marketing and your business, I would avoid polarizing type of content, polarizing ads or marketing or whatever it may be. If you're struggling, you're up against the wall, things are dying down. Think of it as Eric said, a Hail Mary pass, then you may want to end up trying it out and seeing what it does for you. Yeah, I'm going to name off another one here. So Burger King's Moldy Whopper campaign. So this was when Burger King wanted to show that its food contained no artificial preservatives. And by the way, I used to eat Burger King every day in high school.

4:24and gained a little weight doing that, but it's okay. The chicken sandwiches are great, but that's not the point. The point is the ad featured a time-lapse video of a Whopper decaying over a period of 34 days. So it drew a lot of criticism from consumers who found it disgusting, but also others were like, oh, thank you for being transparent, right? So again, Burger King is not well known as like a McDonald's or like if you're in California, not as well known as like an In-N-Out, for example. And so Burger King, from a brand kind of awareness perspective, they've had to step up. And then also here's another one and we can work towards wrapping up here, but Pepsi did one too.

4:59So here's the trend here. You have Pepsi that did it, Burger King that did it. They're largely like number two or number three. And then you have like a number one Nike taking a shot, right? So usually these are gambles when I'm looking at some of the examples here. So that's what it is. And that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate if you subscribe, let us know what you thought about this episode and don't forget to hit us on YouTube as well. And we'll see you later.