The Worst Position a Brand Can Be In Is Not Being Thought About At All

There’s a bar in my neighborhood that I go to often to play pool. I’m not very good, but I like to play. There are a few regulars who also play a lot and I’ve gotten to know some of them over the last few months. I was playing with one of the regulars on New Years Eve when we got into what I felt like was a bit of an awkward situation. It weighed on me for the next couple of days so about a week later I pulled her aside and said, “I think we might have had some miscommunication on New Years and I just want to make sure you don’t think I’m an asshole.” Her response was, “what? I have no idea what you’re talking about, I don’t think anything.” This should have made me feel better but, it didn’t. She didn’t say, “no I don’t think you’re an asshole” or even, “I don’t know what you’re referring to but let’s talk about it,” she just said, “I don’t think anything.” It was very much like the scene in Mad Men where Don Draper responds to a disgruntled junior staffer by saying, “I don’t think about you at all.” Worse than telling the staffer he doesn’t like him, Don is saying that he doesn’t even bother spending the energy to like or dislike him. He just doesn’t care. That’s what it felt like the pool regular was telling me too.

This kind of apathy reminds me of the Elie Wiesel quote, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” The original quote was about a very serious subject, the Holocaust, and as a grandchild of holocaust survivors I don’t mean to trivialize it but I think the sentiment also has broader application to our lives, and to advertising.

Too many brands put too much effort into not being hated that they forego the opportunity to be loved and end up in a place where people are just, indifferent. We see this in creative research where we have a concept that some people love but a few people hate and we say, ‘well we don’t want anyone to hate us, so we can’t do that’ and we go with the thing that no one hates, but no one really loves either.

Our goal in advertising should be to be loved by a chosen segment of our audience, even if that means being hated by others. Because those lovers are the people who will insist on our brand and be loyal to it. When we talk to our target audience for a brand and they say they don’t really have an opinion on it but they’re looking for X or Y feature in the category we think, ‘that’s good, we can even tell them we have X and Y feature and that will get them to buy the brand.’ The problem is, all any other brand has to do to steal that consumer is, say the same thing, or say they have more of X or Y, or say they have X and Y at a lower price. If we can get people to love our brand though, even at the expense of others hating it, those lovers will choose it regardless of a competitor’s mildly better features or benefits — they likely won’t even consider those other brands at all.

I can think of two recent examples of this in my own life. I just got new headphones and I love Apple so I was only choosing between the 3rd Generation AirPods and the 2nd Generation AirPod Pros, I have no idea what kinds of features Sony or Bose headphones have. I also got a new credit card and I love American Express so my choices were between the Amex Gold card and the Amex Platinum. Apparently the Chase Sapphire card has some good benefits but I never even considered it.

That kind of brand love is well worth the haters. It may even be a good sign to have a segment of the market that hates you because that means you’re eliciting strong emotions and there are probably others who love your brand and will stick with it.

Just this week I read about (aka saw on TikTok) the convenience store and gas station chain, Kum & Go, a brand with many lovers and ostensibly some haters. The chain was recently sold to FJ Management who owns another similar chain and is doing away with the Kum & Go brand in favor of one of it’s other brands, Maverick — a brand with no haters but no lovers either. FJ Management cited, ‘concern about the inadvertent double entendre of the name,’ with one executive saying, “if your’e growing cross regionally, which brand do you think will have an appeal to a new audience?” Upon hearing about the rebrand, some Kum & Go lovers took to X to express their disapproval, one saying, “Wtf this was the best part of my Iowa trip” and another, “this makes me so unbelievably sad, why are you taking away one of my favorite staples of Colorado?” Plainly put, FJ Management and Maverick are scared of being associated with the name Kum & Go because they’re afraid some people will be turned off by it. But they’re missing the even greater number of people who will, and already do, love it.

I’ve written about Liquid Death in the past and its a great example of a brand that has embraced its haters as a way to build brand lovers. Just one of many examples of this from Liquid Death is the music video it recently released called, “Fuck Whoever Started This” in which internet haters burn Liquid Death at the stake (literally). Unlike the rest of the bottled and canned water category, Liquid Death doesn’t sell on features and benefits that no one really cares about like the ph level of the water or the purity of the stream the water comes from. It instead created an awesome brand that engendered strong feelings across the board. That certainly means some brand haters but Liquid Death welcomes the hate because with the haters comes even more brand lovers. In the words of hip hop artist Rico Richie, “If you ain’t got no haters, you ain’t poppin.”

Haters can even be a good target for a brand. In 2009 Dominos revenue was sinking and it needed to revitalize its brand. It could have targeted those who were indifferent to Dominos to try to get them to order more but instead, the Dominos Pizza Turnaround campaign specifically targeted people who hated Dominos. The campaign acknowledged in its ads that the haters were justified and promised to do better. In the years since the campaign, Dominos yearly revenue has skyrocketed from $1.4 Billion to $4.5 Billion, suggesting that it successfully converted a lot of its haters to lovers. What makes haters a great target is what they have in common with lovers, they have strong feelings about the category and a willingness to engage in it. You can turn hate into love but you can’t turn indifference into caring.

When consumers have no reaction to our brand, we think of it is an acceptable middle ground because, at least they don’t hate us and maybe they will still decide to buy our brand if we tempt them with price or a new feature. But it’s that indifference to our brands that is the true opposite of loving them. We should be thinking about this more personally. When someone tells us they have no opinion on our brand, that’s the pool regular telling me she doesn’t think about me at all.