Business and Controversy – a Good Thing?

I recently joined a news group focusing on sales – and one post got me thinking, talking about controversy as a sales tactic – and especially the ‘Rich Jerk’ and how everyone had an opinion about the guy – and bought.

I’m not a big fan of controversy, but I understand how it can get results. And while the Rich jerk showed one form of controversy (I’m better than you, so you wanna be me?) there’s others:

• A few years back little Tommy/Timmy/Jimmy needed to break the guiness book of records for emails received, so everyone supported him by sending a chain email. Timmy didn’t exist, but an email harvesting company did, likely laughing at how easy it was to get millions of addresses.
• On a different forum, one fellow started badmouthing another – so much so that others sympathized with the first person and bought his product in droves. While it may have been legitimate, if it wasn’t it was a neat trick to boost sales (see my blog entry on it)
• Because of being in a seperate timezone, there’s rumors that Hawaii alone may have up to 33% of the votes on American Idol, and people are crying foul at this ‘obvious’ evidence of tampering (when in fact the A.I. people can do what they want legally) – and everyone tunes in…

And those are just the tip of the iceberg – stir things up, appeal to whatever emotion you want, and watch the results come in. You may leave a little piece of your soul at the door, however…

This entry was posted Wednesday, April 12th, 2006, and is filed under Advertising, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. Comments are closed. Pings are open. You can use this trackback URl.

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