Building An Enemy
One of the most effective ways to separate your customers from non-customers is to create a common enemy. This can be a real or perceived threat, a person holding them down or their own lack of knowledge turned into a personification.
It’s pretty common pretty much everywhere, and if you watch more than thirty seconds of a news channel you’ll see it.
Let’s call it, “enemy marketing,” and find out how it can make your business better, both morally and commercially.
How To Build An Enemy
If you are a functioning adult, you probably don’t have any enemies. Life is too short and nobody really cares about what you’ve got going on.
(Uh-oh… a bunch of Twitter celebrities would be really upset at that idea.)
Let’s assume the readers of this blog are functioning human beings who’d rather get ahead than score melodrama points. Nobody hates you and everyone likes you. Yet you want to boost your crowd appeal and distinguish your audience from the regular unwashed masses.
What do you do?
Here’s what you do. Get a pen and paper and write a list of things that you’re really opposed to.
It might be:
- People who lie
- People who steal
- Godless folks
- Religious folks
- Communist pigs
- Capitalist pigs
- People who don’t care for the environment
- Old boomers who stole all your money
- Young millennials who stole all your money
- Fat people
- Thin people
You get the picture and you begin to see why I don’t have any time for the politics/social warfare crowd. It’s dividing and conquering all the way down.
Anyway, you’ve got a list of things you don’t like. It doesn’t matter what they are, but it should probably be stuff that you’re against commercially.
So if you run a fitness YouTube channel, go to war with the food standards agency that’s making people fat or whatever. Don’t support Trump or Black Lives Matter or something that has nothing to do with your business and life. You’ll just waste your time and alienate people.
Use A Little Mythology
So, you’ve got a list of stuff you’re opposed to and that you are trying to undo.
If it’s health, you’ve got the doctors who’d rather give you anti-depressants than tell you to ditch your abusive spouse.
If it’s business, you’ve got the multinational conglomerates that skim off the top, don’t pay taxes and put honest and real human beings out of work.
When it’s relationships, you can go with whatever your niche demands; girls with standards, girls without standards, guys with either/or, the divorce courts, the dating sites… you get the picture.
Whatever your niche, there are going to be roadblocks to people getting what they want. These can be real and/or perceived, and they’re just a basic part of market research.
The bit that you need to do and the next step you need is to turn those roadblocks into one personified enemy. This is how mythology is created. David and Goliath is the same story as all of those hero v. monster tales.
In all of them, your hero isn’t just a bloke with a sword. He’s the embodiment of all that is good. Countering that is the idea of your evil monster. Not just ugly, the monster is also terrible, decadent and especially dangerous for sweet innocent little children.
That is what your business is fighting against.
If you go to a supermarket and buy some terrible cereal or something, it’s not enough that it’s a bad product. It is literally the conspiracy of millions of conspirators worldwide; designed to stop you from eating a healthy diet and load your children with sugar that’ll give them ADHD and make them stupid. Oh, and they’ll be orphans because you’re going to have a heart attack due to obesity after a long battle with type-2 diabetes.
Fighting Crime Like The Scooby Doo Gang
Now, you don’t have to put that exact message in all of your marketing materials, but it’s at the back of your mind. Be under no illusion; that is how to sell a healthy breakfast. It touches everything; fear, greed and that thing at the back of your mind that says, “Hey… maybe that’s right… maybe Kellogg’s do want to kill me.”
It also allows you, your business and your marketing to tap into something greater. When you’re a hero, you’re championing causes and your customers will want to buy into it.
For the ethical, this means whatever you’re doing is more than selling stuff. For the unethical it’s a neat marketing trick.
Hopefully you’ll be the former, but regardless of your personal ethics, the hero vs. villain thing works universally.
Final Thoughts
If you aren’t using hero vs. villain and enemy marketing in your sales stuff then you could be doing better.
If the idea appals you, then just be aware of it in your day to day life. I could have easily branded this article under the “Brain Stuff” category and told you all to beware of anyone who sets you up on an, “us versus them,” type deal instead.
But there are people who’ve asked me before about how to merge their business interests with their social or ethical interests, and I guess this would be a good first step.