Every marketer wants to attain a passionate following that would live and die - well, not literally, but you get the gist - to support their brand. One of the greatest ways to achieve this is to polarize your marketplace or community. We all desire to be seen as a rebel or maverick: someone who is doing something different, cool, and even controversial. From an early age, we have all desired to be part of the perceived "cool crowd". Brands that leverage this desire will find that their efforts will be enhanced by their customers' own need to belong. Apple and HubSpot are living proof that a polarized audience can pay hug dividends.
HubSpot vs. Outbound Marketing
In a recent blog post, 8 Lessons From HubSpot's $32 Million Round with Salesforce, Google and Sequoia, Brian Halligan, co-founder of Hubspot, commented on one key lesson was that "You Need an Enemy". "In our case, we picked "outbound marketing" as the enemy. I remember my co-founder showing a slide of a kitten one time and stating something like "every time you buy a list and spam it, a kitten dies.""
HubSpot is an "Inbound Marketing Software" solution whose community is extremely loyal and passionate. HubSpot not only created a whole new category of company, "Inbound Marketing", they also developed an "us vs. them" marketing attitude. They did this by declaring that outbound, interruption-based marketing was dying and prospects nowadays want to find the companies themselves. While this polarized the community, it certainly launched HubSpot to massive success. The key to their success is that their customers feel that they are "different", belonging to an exclusive breed of marketers; and revere them with much more distinction than a catchy marketing slogan ever could.
Mac vs. PC
There probably is no better example of community polarization than with Apple. Apple's marketing strategy has been, and is, the envy of many companies. Apple has been able to achieve what all companies yearn to accomplish: they have turned their customers into legions of fanatical evangelists. They have used the "Us Vs. Them" approach for decades. Their "1984" commercial epitomized this when they drew a sharp distinction between the lone attractive, young woman and the lines of brainwashed drones.
To further hammer the point home, a year later Apple released their "Lemmings" commercial that pushed people even deeper into one of the two camps. In this commercial, they portrayed PC users as blindfolded businesspeople functioning like suicidal rodents follow each other off a cliff.
Apple is still continuing this approach today; look at the widely popular Mac Guy vs. PC Guy ads. These draw a sharp distinction - do you want to be one of the cool kids, or a dork? One thing that is interesting and consistent in Apple commercials is that they focus on the people who use the product. These ads convey little or no actual product information, and instead focus on mocking PC users while portraying Apple users in a favourable way.
Apple is not the only one who has successfully leveraged this concept. Coke and Pepsi have battled for years both using this tactic - to the point where they have polarized consumers as well as retailers. How many times have you been to a restaurant and they tell you that they are either a Coke place/establishment or a Pepsi one? The famous "Pepsi Generation" campaign was all about Pepsi drinkers as a group; although in the long run Coke has held its leading position, the two have dominated the market place.
Other examples include car manufactures....well more so trucks. While they have not done it as much in the advertising, their owner base tends to be very divided between who they support. Truck owners in particular seem to consider themselves part of groups, as shown by the ongoing animosity between Chevy people and Ford people, to say nothing of the elitist owners of HUMMERs. Let's not even get started talking about the whole JEEP craze....
Join the Tribe
A great explanation of this comes from the social media guru himself Seth Godin. He states:
Brand management is so 1999.
Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money-based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc... Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world...
What people really want is the ability to connect with each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about...
People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better. [From Seth's Blog - Tribe Management.]
In developing your social community do your followers and customers feel like they are part of a tribe? Have you been able to make your community feel different versus those of your competition's? Does your brand have a tribe? Have you been able to define an "enemy" group that strengthens the cohesiveness of your own? Achieving this will be the key to develop the brand loyalty that Apple, HubSpot, and others have been able to achieve.