Don't Let Your Product Get Booed

Every night from June to August, we watched as town hall meetings erupted into screaming matches. On September 9, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!” at President Obama during his speech to a joint session of Congress. And just the other night, throngs of opera aficionados booed loudly at The Metropolitan Opera’s opening night performance of “Tosca”.

Booing at the Opera? Really? Decorum seems to have left the building, and I keep wondering what will be the next victim of this anger.

As consumers, we boo all the time. When we make choices, when we pick one product over another, we are in a sense booing against the competitor. So which side of the booing will your product be on? To make sure your offering won’t be the next casualty of this surging consumer rage, you want to understand where this fury comes from.

Luckily there are answers. In the past we have covered principles that shed light on the mechanics of boos and cheers. By understanding these you may be able to manipulate them to your advantage. Essentially, boos emerge as a three step process:

1. A consumer sees you or your product and initially they like it - they relate to it. As neurologist and neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explained in my blog a few weeks ago, consumers are wired to initially be empathetic and find common ground with you or your product.
2. Then the consumer categorizes you. They call you republican or democrat, traditional or modern, like me or not like me. Buddhists and Carl Jung would call these “re-cognizing” you. Iacoboni says it’s these categories or “labels” that actually divide us.
3. Then they like or dislike you, based not on who you are but on what category you hold.

The key then is to skillfully manage step two. Play with categories to make sure you end up in the cheering section.

Apple does this well. Apple's marketing strategy essentially creates two sides - Apple and PC - and tries to convince people to boo from the Apple side. They have defined what it is to be a “Mac” person, and have created a consumer identity with a loud cheering section.

Credit card companies and banks do this poorly. They are booed millions of times per day on "corporate hate" Web sites.

Picking the right category can be worth millions. Creating a whole new category can be revolutionary. TiVo is a good example of this: it transformed the US TV Industry by creating a new category, the DVR.  By doing this, TiVo avoided boos (no one hated DVRs) and built an enthusiastic cheering session. Gatorade did the same thing with drinks. By preempting Coca-Cola and other competitors, Gatorade disrupted the existing drink market and created a whole new category - sports drinks.

Turn boos into your advantage. Ask yourself these questions:

1. What new product or service can you develop that creates a new space or category?
2. How can you market this new product or service to build a cheering section?
3. What do you want this product or service to say about its users? 
4. How can you convince people to want to be a part of your brand?
5. How can you discourage booing by being good to everyone?