Current Topic: Advertising

When Negative Branding works

''Read this, you loser..''

Quiz time! What do Weekend Offender, Gucci Guilty, Monster Energy, Fresh Ego Kid, Arrogant Bastard Ale, Dior Sauvage have in common? 

That’s right: these are all brand or product names with a negative, dark or unpleasant connotation. Terms like offender, monster, and bastard are all related to negative concepts in our brains.

But did you know that this type of “negative” branding can lead to the most positive outcomes? Recent research shows that negative branding can make brands more appealing to members of the target audience, and increases their willingness to pay.

In this blog, you’ll learn why and when negative branding works, so you can use it to your advantage.

Are you ready to discover the bright side of negative branding? Just keep reading!

Imagine walking through the electronics store looking for a new coffee machine. Suddenly you hear a familiar melody echoing through the shopping corridors. It happens to be that one song you played over and over again back in high school. Overwhelmed by nostalgic feelings, you continue your search for that coffee machine and you notice two offers. One is the store's #1 best-selling coffee machine, while the other is a limited edition machine with unique features. What do you do? Will those nostalgic feelings affect your choice? 

A new neuromarketing insight suggests that nostalgia undoubtedly affects the choices we make by influencing our tendency to either conform to or deviate from the group, which is moderated by the existing social ties between the consumer and others.

Are you curious to know which coffee machine you would prefer? Keep on reading! 

As retailers are always driven to increase sales and purchase intentions, they often rely on promotions. Consequently, we are exposed to attractive offers all the time. But how can you make sure that these promotional offers are really effective in increasing advertising success?

Well, if you're a fan of italicized or slanted fonts, you might want to read this. A recent study has demonstrated that even the selected font style has a considerable impact on consumers' purchase decisions. 

Continue reading and find out when we tend to fall for promotional offers!

The rise of social media has made watching television more fun and interactive. We get regular status updates from our friends who are commenting and sharing the latest trends and their opinions on current TV shows (not to forget about the endless amount of hashtags and tweets giving us live updates on current developments as the show proceeds).

On top of this, it seems as if the sudden rise of niche influencers has radically increased the volume of online chatter. These recent developments seem to have kickstarted a new multi-screen phenomenon, otherwise known as “social TV”, which is the joint viewing of TV shows alongside the consumption of program-related social media chatter.

This rapid growth of social TV has raised numerous questions for today’s advertisers: How can shows with a high volume of social TV activity, so called “social shows,” benefit today’s advertisers in this age of a multitasking TV audience?

When I was a student, I once had the honour of giving a presentation to the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company. In this presentation me and my project group proposed multiple recommendations in order to improve their communication efforts. This was one of my first big presentations, so naturally I was a bit nervous. This feeling caused me to refer to their communication efforts as “shit”. In all honesty, those communication efforts were certainly suboptimal, but my choice of words was even more so. I can still hear my group leader grunting loudly in the background when I think of it.