We’re often asked, whom should we target with negative marketing?
There are a few options, starting with, the most obvious:
The most obvious people to target are your weak competitors. If someone searches for them, you can doubly reinforce the most negative experience of their customers online.
Just think about the math: if a customer has 10% of the market, and we can decrease that to, say, 7.5% of the market, a fall of 25%. Well, it’s a reasonable assumption that, that 25% lost will be divided evenly (according to the proportions of current sales) to the current players in the space. Thus, you’re likely to increase your sales a bit!
Plus, it feels good.
THe second group to target are your strong competitors. That’s harder because, as stronger players with more hands in the cards, they’ll already have a strong reputation, so making them look bad is much harder to achieve.
But we have our methods, don’t worry! Want to know how we target our strong competitors? Just ask! :)
The third group to go after are people who are not necessarily your competitors, but people at a high-risk to cause some sort of major problem. Maybe a partner, maybe an ex-employee.
A key point to remember is, exposing other people’s (true!) negative actions to the world is a great insurance policy: it massively incentivizes them to act well towards you because you can make them look bad endlessly!
