Now, for our stateside readers, I don’t know if you have this advert, but here in the UK we have this advert for Marmite where the tagline is “You either love it or you hate it”, and the advert is always an example of someone who really hates Marmite (http://www.marmite.com)

Now, this is strange, and was a big risk when it came out.  The general consensus was “How can you make something sell by telling everyone it’s terrible?” and yet it works.

Another great example is http://www.tiddles.co.uk also known as Tim’s Badly Drawn Cat Website.  With this, Tim can’t draw cats to save his life. But that doesn’t matter.  Because the cats are SO bad, and so cheesy, they’ve actually become cool. This is what I call RAD (Really Awful Drawing) effect - when something is so bad, it becomes good as a result.

So how can you market with this? Well, to start with, you have to understand why things that use this reverse psychology work. Put simply, it’s because these people/companies don’t take themselves seriously, and have a sense of humor about their products. They look at themselves and see the slightly ridiculous part. So try looking at what you do in that light. Examples of Internet marketing that have used this recently are The Rich Jerk and the Anti-Spam Sales Letter site.

However, the real power with things like this is that they spread like wildfire. Anything that’s a little bit unique or different is guaranteed to get people talking. And when you get a viral marketing campaign like that going, people start buying.

Have a sense of humor. Odds are your customers do too, and you will be rewarded for it!

Pete

Related Articles:

• Search Engine Marketing
• WinAmp Marketing