Trolling people is easier than being funny or clever. This is not a new challenge, but here we are, once again pretending that failing at it is a tactic and not a weakness.
“Some advertising and marketing agencies are now intentionally leaning into the volatility of the current political climate, not to take a stand but to manufacture outrage,” said Mikah Sellers, an advertising consultant who has worked with major brands including Booz Allen Hamilton and Carfax. Companies are tapping into cultural rifts and driving wedges in hopes of capitalizing on the strife, he said.
How will they capitalize on pissing people off? Unclear! In fact, here are the companies (sometimes a generous classification) referenced in this article that are allegedly getting exactly what they want from this tactic:
- Friend
- Nucleus Genomics
- Skims (Kim Kardashian’s clothing brand)
- Sabrina Carpenter
- Pippa
- Cluely
- Clad Labs
- Artisan
Leave the pop musician and the reality star aside, because I understand the commercial viability of trolling in those industries. But the rest? These companies are not successful. They can scream all they’d like about how they’re getting what they want as they slowly (or quickly) go out of business, but this largely startup-fueled delusion that life is either TikTok or the Trump administration, and you basically need attract eyeballs at any cost and then go from there is not actually backed up by the facts or financials.
And the thing is, the smart counter to bland, play-it-safe branding isn’t stupid, insecure edge-lording. It’s staring you right in the face — it’s CostCo, dammit! If you want to be edgy, get your name in a story like this, which has spread around the internet organically so much on its own that it has its own Snopes article confirming its authenticity:
“I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.’ And he said, ‘If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”
Just an incredible quote. No notes. This is the kind of shit people want. That they feel. It’s not generation or culture-coded, other than the fact that people are constantly being screwed by companies acting in their rational, best financial interests at our expense, and here’s a guy running a company who is just MAD about it, stomping on everyone’s least favorite title (“CEO”) and even threatening (tongue-in-cheek) violence over it!
None of this is new. How about this Dollar Shave Club launch ad, from over a decade ago?
It’s the same thing. It works because (1) it’s violently pro-customer, and (2) it’s about what the company actually does to/for those customers. The edgy tone is fine, but the cause of that edginess feels more like genuine excitement about what they’re able to do for customers, and anger at the worst, most anti-customer aspects of their competitors.
When everyone was watching this ad and talking about how they needed one just like it, we didn’t have to figure out what percentage of them were hate-watching it, because it was zero. In fact, when everyone tried to do this, the problem they ran into was (a) they weren’t actually this passionate about their business or, more specifically, their differentiator, and (b) they’re not fun, creative, or funny!
Conversely, this latest run of pathetically click baiting people into looking at you for a second, rolling their eyes, and then, as they walk away, shouting “Ha! You’re in the funnel now!” completely misses the point. It fees like it comes from a generation of attention-grabbers who have spent too much of their lives on phones, in feeds, and quantifying every aspect of their social experiences. And while generational preferences adjust (I’m sure much of their audience is afflicted by this same problem), we’re not talking about music and language choices here. We’re talking about whether people want to feel happy or angry, like a great new day is dawning or the dumbest, most obviously wrong person in the world just slid into their DMs.
Nobody wants that. My kids don’t want to feel that way, and neither do their friends. When they do feel that way, sure, it’s hard to escape. But they hate it, and banking on people who hate you and what you represent to become customers (let alone repeat customers) is insane.