Controversy Sells! But What are Some of the Risks?

Hello to all.

In a group of CEOs, we had one of our friends ask if creating a controversy blog is good for her business. For simplicity, I'll call her Lisa. Here's my message which highlights positive & negrative points about controversial blogs or messages on various social media platforms & their potential impact on your company.

In my message, I intentionally didn't want to take a specific position if this is good or bad, just some areas to think about & for all of us to also reflect on. Thought this would be of interest to some & hope you find it beneficial.

Thanks Lisa for giving us all a very impressive case study that each of us could reflect on from their point of view. It’s clearly very smart, quite funny, well-articulated & is quickly becoming the most commented on article in this global group.

I’ll just assume that you decide to post the article & that it goes viral.

Here are some points to think about:

1. A number of the people who like the article will probably try your product if it's available in the stores around them. For those, you've achieved what you wanted.

2. For many of the people reading the article & hearing about the company for the 1st time, they would be wondering what's the main message your company is trying to portray. Is there a clear link between your products, the subject you chose to mock & being funny? Is your company just riding the wave of jokes about the subject that became recently the talk of the Internet? Is it a marketing gimmick?

3. If the main point is to spread brand recognition thru being funny, then you might want to have someone keep preparing similar articles in the future which takes current news, put a spin on them & link them to your company & products. This shouldn't be a one-off. You're setting up an expectation about the future of what people might see from you going forward.

4. What would be the reflection on your large retail clients or large customers you care a lot about? Also, how would potential investors see this new method of "marketing"? Would any of your large customers think negatively about it, in relationship to the brand?

As you mentioned Lisa, controversy sells, especially on social media.

I remember the marketing manager of HubSpot in an MIT entrepreneurship lecture telling us when they started, they focused so much on putting out blogs that generated a lot of controversy among their followers. That attracted a lot of more followers, which they eventually turned some into paying customers.

One of the most retweeted & commented on posts & the highest used hashtag in Saudi history was from one person back in 2015 with relatively few followers making a joke about a gym that became famous by opening lots of branches across the country. This person tweeted “If I have space in my backyard, Fitness Times would open a branch.” The company immediately replied, “Pls give us the location coordinates of your backyard.” That day, the largest companies in Saudi Arabia tried to capitalize on the hashtag & started building on the tweet going viral. A total of 120 companies used the hashtag, all in a funny way & related to their products/services.

There was a lot of discussion if the tweet was planned with Fitness Times but both the company & the person denied any coordination. The company went on to IPO 3 years after that. But I don’t think it had anything to do with that tweet. Also, the person on that tweet & hashtag became a big Twitter influencer. He had 150K followers before the tweet, which is a big number anyways. Now, he has about 2 million followers.

So, controversy sells but that comes with some risks which one has to assess the impact. Also for companies, the tweet or blog will be more famous if the subject is related to their offering.

Hope you find this of value & best of luck to all.

#FitnessTimesSA #Globalize