Online Marketing: Have You Tried Reverse Psychology?

An old saying goes "A knock is as good as a boost." and another says, "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Here's a couple of examples:

Alfred Hitchcock - do we really have to explain who he was? - would announce the commercial break on his TV show during his monologues. Most of the time, this was some dryly sarcastic remark about their sponsor, and sometimes it was even insulting. Advertisers bristled at first, but eventually fought for the privilege to be in the first spot after the introduction, because the viewers tended to pay more attention to the commercial.

A better example: Marmite! The TV commercials for Marmite yeast extract have made the tagline "You either love it or hate it!" into a household phrase, and their marketing has been a smashing success! Check out this commercial clip for a good example. Now, how refreshing is that? Market your product by suggesting that there will be people out there who hate it! How bold! How original! How funny!

So, back to web marketing: what's your online marketing campaign like? Is it earnest? Does it go for the hard sell? Does it take its product seriously? Is it by-the-book marketing-speak? Well, then... is it boring and unoriginal?

Sometimes the best web marketing is at least the kind which shows the world that the company doesn't take itself too seriously. Yahoo named itself after a word that means "uncouth rube". Google has used primary nursery colors and plain page design to suggest that there isn't much to them. Craigslist has one of the ugliest sites on the web, and then mocks itself with an ASCII banner. When the Twitter network goes down, it mocks itself for doing so by showing visitors the "Fail Whale" page. So what do Twitter fans do? They start a fan club for it!

That's the power of not taking yourself too seriously. Wear some pie on your face every now and then.

Peter Brittain


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