The Pros and Cons of Polarizing Marketing

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Eric Siu and Neil Patel

Business, Marketing, Careers

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode #2443, Neil and Eric discuss the pros and cons of polarizing marketing. When you use polarizing marketing, you run the risk of alienating your audience. But you also create an opportunity to elevate brand awareness and gain a loyal following that aligns with your values. In this conversation, we take a closer look at noteworthy polarizing marketing campaigns from brands like Budweiser, Nike, and Burger King, and unpack why some of these gambles paid off, and others didn’t. Tune in to learn more about polarizing marketing, including when to implement it and when to steer clear! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:00] Today’s topic: The Pros and Cons of Polarizing Marketing. [00:07] An overview of the concept of polarizing marketing. [00:21] Budweiser’s marketing campaign with Dylan Mulvaney and how it polarized their community. [00:44] Why do you need to decide what your goal is before you implement polarizing marketing? [01:28] The spaces that benefit most from polarizing marketing. [03:42] When to avoid polarizing content. [04:12] Burger King’s Moldy Whopper campaign and how it increased brand awareness. [05:11] That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Budweiser Dylan Mulvaney Nike Colin Kaepernick Burger King The Moldy Whopper Campaign McDonald's Pepsi Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, so we want to talk about if polarizing marketing, well we want to talk about the pros and cons behind that.
0:07.5	So polarizing marketing, just to give you an example is when you decide to do something, when you decide to speak out and you say something that really polarizing means
0:16.2	you have a big chunk of people that are for and a big chunk of people that are against,
0:21.4	right? And one example of this might be the Budweiser
0:24.8	campaign that was run with Dylan Movaney, I believe, and so Dylan Movaney is part of the
0:29.6	LGBTQ community and it really polarized the Budweiser community and that's an example of
0:35.6	we talked about the pros and cons before in a reaction video but we want to talk about just
0:40.1	in general not related to Budweiser but just the general the good and bad around it.
0:44.4	When you do polarizing marketing sometimes you're going to get haters and you're going to
0:49.7	get people who love you but you got to figure out what you're trying to optimize for
0:53.0	so for example if you're optimizing for revenue but your revenue tanks then it
0:57.3	failed but if you're optimizing for brand awareness a lot of times polarizing
1:01.7	marketing has a best brand awareness from what we've seen.
1:05.0	If you look at the Budweiser example, Eric and I were pulling it up on a Google trends sheet
1:10.0	and if you look at how many people were searching for Budweiser from their
1:14.2	latest campaign if their goal was brand awareness I think it was what like 10
1:18.6	15 times more than normal error it was something more than 10 times if I'm not mistaken.
1:23.8	Yeah, he's nodding his head yes. So you've got to figure out what your goal is.
1:28.1	What I found is if you work with a lot of enterprise brands and you're in B2B, polarizing marketing tends to hurt you more than help you.
1:37.0	If you're working in the consumer space, it can help or hurt you.
1:41.0	I've seen it more so hurting you in Enterprise in B2B, but in B2C I've seen it more so going 50-50.
1:50.6	It can go either way.
	...

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