Owning the Negative Comments

Owning the Negative Comments

We aren’t branding experts, but something we’ve learned over the years are the brands that are bold, know who they are, and cater to a specific audience usually perform well. When you have a lot of eyes on you that usually comes with a lot of hate. Negative comments can seem to take over, and as social media marketers (most of the time) that is our worst nightmare. I have been in the industry the last ten years and 9 times out of 10, my brands want us to point people to email them, take the convo to the DMs, or generally delete the negative ones and block people. Sometimes that is the right mood when they are spammy, but other times it can feel like not enough. It’s really refreshing when we see brand’s who deal with it head on - not only responding directly, but making it a campaign.

Oatly is not a stranger to the hate comments. They recently launched a campaign specifically to the haters - allowing them to keep hating. They recently launched a campaign: FCK OATLY - a series of websites that tell you what’s “wrong” with their brand - probably easy for them as they collected all the negative comments over the years and used that as a successful campaign - what a way to win! Not only do you start on fckoatly.com but you can go through several sites until you land at fckfckfckfckfckoatly.com and have a number to call to give your hate comments to a real person. I wonder how many internet trolls have the balls to actually say their comments outloud.

Another brand I am obsessed with is Flaus - recently re-branded (and I have shared their IG feed several times) is a dental flosser brand that seriously got the branding, art direction, and packaging right. I recently came across their TikTok account to find a slew of negative comments - I read through them an honestly most are literally non-sense - people just talking with no research. As a startup that can be a lot to deal with, but their team is fighting back and I am all here for it. They are taking it head on Tiktok and replying to comments with video responses - something that is really rare from brands. I applaud. As a consumer I did think the price point was a bit high, but after seeing their fight on TikTok I want to make the purchase to support them. Brave brands (and people) deserve to win.

Then today I came across this LinkedIn post and wasn’t sure what to think - this is a B2B cat fight - brands “stealing” other brands ideas or concepts. Now this one really had me thinking because at first I was totally on their side - but after reading comments I wasn’t too sure. This is not something I would recommend, but I do appreciate the bold post and the conversation that was started. What do you think?

I say all this to say, don’t let the negative comments bring you down. This happens to everyone. What I do want you to learn is - do better with how you utilize this information - make it useful to your advantage. Something I read a while back regarding negative comments was using your competitors negative comments (or complaints) as features for your messaging - I am telling you we will thank the haters one day for making some of these brands MORE successful.