Accentuate your positives
John McCarron, April 2023
The average US consumer is exposed to 4,000-10,000* marketing messages each day. To cut through that clutter, you might be tempted to call in the shock troops of attention-grabbing negativity: from competitor-bashing copy to dramatizing and promoting the problem – real or imaginary – your product or service answers. Before you do, though, ask yourself what difference you want to make in that advertising-saturated consumer’s day. Will you be the uplift in their day of just adding to the angst?
“Tell a positive story, and you compete on your own terms, not someone else’s.”
‘Knocking copy’ is nothing new. It asks us to vote against one politician or party rather than for one. Rely on exploiting competitors’ weaknesses, however, and you’re no longer in charge of your strategy. They are. Tell a positive story, and you compete on your own terms, not someone else’s. No brand would think to promote its ‘new and improved’ service or product by pointing to the ‘old and unsatisfactory’ problems of the previous version. So why rely on negativity to persuade people to deselect competitors rather than select you? Give them positive reasons to choose you.
“Confident brands look to be a positive force in the world and the lives of their customers and, to use that ugly word, their ‘stakeholders’ too.”
Journalists know negativity sells. Just count the number of ‘good news’ stories in your newsfeed today (good luck!). Brands should be more cautious. In a world of purpose-driven brands, no one has a mission ‘to spread fear, doubt and anxiety in the world’. Confident brands look to be a positive force in the world and the lives of their customers and, to use that ugly word, their ‘stakeholders’ too. That same positivity should pull through into marketing. Charity marketers learned the lesson of ‘sadvertising’ the hard way. By always dramatizing the negative, they created ‘charity fatigue’. Selling the problem left potential donors feeling overwhelmed and impotent. So they simply switched off.
“Be bold. Be controversial. But above all, be positive.”
Beryl McAlhone called her famous book on brand design ‘A Smile in the Mind’, not a ‘A Frown on the Brow’. Will your brand and marketing create that smile in people’s minds? Accentuating the positive is not simply a recipe for apple pie and platitudes. It’s about standing for something, not against someone else’s thing. Be bold. Be controversial. But above all, be positive.
*Forbes Finding Brand Success in the Digital World.