An example of applied Black-Hat Marketing

Among those involved in marketing, there is a tendency to think that creating campaigns for a large multinational is a damn easy task. After all, they have million-dollar budgets, they can attempt any experiment, and we're talking about products that already have well-established brands, a loyal audience, and never encounter major sales problems. What could possibly go wrong? Even a child could handle such a responsibility, right?

Well, the answer is: no, not at all.

When you're at the top, you face challenges that others sailing at lower levels can't even imagine. For instance:

1. Maintaining high standards is more demanding than reaching high standards.

2. If you fall, you get hurt badly because you fall from a great height.

3. The expectations of stakeholders and customers are high (proportional to the importance of the brand).

4. As the proverb says, "It takes a lifetime to build but only seconds to destroy".

I could go on, but I believe these few points are already sufficient to clarify the concept.

Therefore, the worst thing that can happen to a large company is relying on a black-hat marketer.

We have already clarified the concept of black-hat marketing and its opposite, white-hat marketing (for those who want to catch up, you can do so here, here, and here). Still, for the sake of brevity, we'll just recall that while white-hat marketers focus on customer needs and product quality, black-hat marketers have an ideological approach. They try to force potential customers to adopt their point of view at any cost and regardless of what the target audience may think or want. Sometimes this approach may work, but oftentimes, it ends up damaging the company, and the successes it achieves, in the long run, can backfire.

It may seem obvious, after all: who wouldn't care about the desires of their target audience? Who wouldn't do their homework before launching a multi-million-dollar campaign? Well, a black-hat marketer certainly wouldn't.

Something similar seems to have happened to Budweiser, one of the world's leading beer producers, with an established brand that until recently seemed unsinkable.

Fact is even the Titanic seemed unsinkable at the time, and we all know how that turned out. That's how someone at Bud thought it was a good idea to choose the well-known LGBTQI+ TikTok star, Dylan Mulvaney, as a spokesperson for the Bud Light line, launching the campaign in early March.

The result? Less than a month later, the company recorded an almost 80% loss in sales for the Light line and an overall -17% compared to the same period the previous year. And worse yet, a $5 billion loss in market capitalization. A significant blow, no doubt.

Why did this campaign turn into such a significant backfire? Because they decided to wage a civil battle in a context where it made no sense. Moreover, as the results show, no one bothered to research in advance how the advertising message would be received.

There are always differences to be respected (and this concept is also one of the cornerstones of the LGBTQI+ community's claims) and ignoring them is bound to result in an own goal.

Besides, would you try to market pork burgers in Dubai? No, because there are cultural differences to be respected, which constitute an insurmountable barrier. Bolognese sauce is one of my favourite pasta sauces, and I find it marvellous, but I would never dream of advertising it in India, a country where cows are sacred and cannot even be touched.

That is why polarizing a campaign is always a terrible idea.

But the most important thing remains to study the target market: the first time Coca-Cola tried to enter the Chinese market, they attempted to transliterate their brand into local ideograms, resulting in a ridiculous outcome. In the ears of a citizen of the former Celestial Empire, the beverage's name sounded like "flattened wax horse" or "bite the wax horse".

Certainly, not something that would make anyone want to try the product.