Iarfhlaith Kelly - Code agus Craic

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about emotional responses, and especially about their role in marketing.

When I look at the very best brands in the world, I see they all generate very strong emotions from both their followers and their detractors. Regardless of whether it’s love, hate, passion, lust, desire, or disappointment, they all generate them in spades.

These emotions are essential to creating communities around the products, companies and brands that we are each trying to create and promote. And we should encourage these communities whether they’re positive or negative.

Someone once told me that the opposite to love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. If we hate something it means we still care. Whereas with apathy, we’re not interested one way or the other and have no desire to join a community or get involved.

We should be trying to avoid this. As crazy as it sounds, we’re much better off having people who passionately hate what we create then having people who couldn’t care either way, or worse still, haven’t even heard of it yet.

So with that in mind, the next time you’re trying to think of an idea, a good approach might be to think about something that would really piss people off. Because chances are if someone hates it, someone else is going to love it.