What's your consumer bitching about?

Brands are just not listening enough, with an eye for a good time to join in.

Most consumers are bitching. The world is becoming an angrier place. And bitching is proven to be a sub-consciously great way to ‘vent’. We may sort of pass it off as ‘something women do more than men’, but we all do it in our own way, with our own set of friends or family.

Brands need to find ways to ‘empathize’ and join into the conversation. If you’re a hair colour brand – what's your consumer bitching about? Are they bitching about how frustrating it is to be growing old and getting grey hair? Are they bitching about that ‘first grey hair they see? Are they bitching about the pain of applying hair colour at home? Join them. Start a Garnier ‘Shit, I got my first grey hair’ community. A place where girls can ‘VENT’ about their first grey hair and find other like minded girls that are doing the same thing. Be a brand that helps bring these girls together, so that they can bond over how painful that moment of life is… help them ‘bitch’. And bitch along with them.

During my tenure At P&G, we had done this campaign for Gillette – Women Against Lazy Stubble, which eventually went on to be a great success for the brand: leading market share, several awards and what not..

If you really think about, what we had really tapped into, was that women love to bitch about men.

So we let them do that. We created enough forums for women to bitch about how much they dislike men with stubbles because that they can’t kiss them and cuddle them and so on and so forth. What happened? Men got agitated and started bitching about women? They started a movement of their own called ‘MAWALIS’- ‘Men against women against lazy stubble’. J Was this a bad thing? Absolutely not. In a 'Ripple analogy', the current is what moves the ripple forward, and a current needs both positive and negative forces working against each other to advance. The negatives (in minor proportions) is the best thing that could happen to a wom campaign. 

We've always loved IKEA campaigns and thought their Word of mouth ideas are inspiring. Here’s one that we think also uses the ‘bitching’ tool in a very engaging interactive manner.

Politics also thrives on this conversational insight. Dialogue is often around bitching out other parties, politicians, businessmen, the government, the system. The conversation works.

So does leveraging a tool like 'bitching' for a brand mean creating 'negative energy' around it? Absolutely not. If a conversation has to multiply it has to inherently carry positive energy. Even when people warn others about something they fear... it is the positive energy of 'be careful' that multiplies the conversation. If done right, helping a consumer 'vent' can create a very strong bond and strengthen the relationship with the brand.

After all, you bitch most with your best friends... an environment you are bound to find the most positive energy in. 

So if you want your brand to get people talking about it, find out what they love bitching about, and then learn how you can best empathize with them. It's one of the many triggers we evaluate when designing word of mouth marketing strategies for brands on WOOP.