Insulting Your Customer Base As A Marketing Strategy: Brave Move or Reckless Exercise?

The customer, it is said, is always right.

Treat them well and they will stay with you, tell their friends about you and end up being your best advocates.

Treat them badly and they will turn on their heels and walk away from you, the products you promote and search out a nicer person with whom to do business.

So surely then, you would be a fool to deliberately set out to insult the very people you hope to recruit as customers?

Conventional wisdom would say you would be quite foolish to use this as a marketing campaign and I would certainly not recommend it to any new marketers out there.

However that is not to say that it would not work. There is, after all, an exception to every rule and you will, no doubt, have heard that rules are there to be broken in any event.

I would suspect that there are only a few marketers who could successfully be insulting and use this as a tactic to get signups and sales along the way.

Jeff Gudgeon from Traffic Power Plus is one of those people who have managed to get the insulting customers strategy just right.

It works for him because Jeff has a great sense of humor and he allows his humor and his personality come out in his online advertising.

A few weeks back he was dismissing people as dinosaurs for not joining his program and more recently he used an image of the child ‘flipping the bird‘ to recruit new members.

Now he is back on the insult trail yet again by suggesting that people must be off their heads for not joining his program and, of course, he has found a suitably controversial image to make his point really hit home.

I could explain it more but it is far easier if I just show you instead. This is Jeff’s latest splash page creation:

Jeff knows that he may upset some people with the image he has used on the page. People can get very passionate when it comes to animals and how they are used in advertising.

He also knows that a lot of people will  connect with what he is doing and will go on to sign up for his program and he is being himself by introducing humor he finds funny.

Jeff said yesterday: “Using over-the-top humor, being different and standing out makes me a lot more members who then become social with me in chat.

“This leads to people telling me they loved my splash, then they become upgraded members when they see I’m a real person with half a real sense of humor.

“People trust that my site does what I say it will which in turn makes me more money and I get a far greater response in signups and upgrades for the over-the-top splashes than I ever do with the more “professional” splash pages.

“I’m getting about 30-50 signups a day now. Up from 8-10 a day just by introducing the “insult my potential members splash designs” a few weeks ago.”

If you are a regular traffic exchange surfer then it is likely that you are going to see a lot more creativity from Jeff in the weeks ahead, once he takes delivery of his new flip cam.

Jeff was on an impromptu Traffic Exchange Live session last night when Jon Olson selected him as the random winner of the camera and the only requirement for getting the prize was an undertaking to use it.

Somehow I don’t think that will be too much of a problem for Jeff. Watch out Blain Jones…you have some new competition in town.

Jeff said he was thrilled to have won the prize and added: “Winning the flip cam was a shock and has the potential to take my online presence into the stratosphere.

“It will allow me the freedom to really show some personality that you just can’t show with a two-dimensional page no matter how humorous the content.”

Tagged as: Jeff Gudgeon, Traffic Power Plus