They know they're pissing you off

They know they're pissing you off

Hey did you see <insert product> they're totally ruining it by doing <insert unpopular practice>.

This may be a shock to you but this is exactly how marketing companies expect you to react.

Shock marketing is superior to positive marketing

Positive marketing is dead. The act of positively marketing is pointless because all companies do this, the imprint a positive message that is left on the viewers mind is little to non because there is no shock value from positive marketing. We remember and react to things which are shocking, if we see something that is expected we forget about it within a few minutes, when we see something which is shocking and causes an emotional react in us, we remember that event forever. Shock marketing works today because people are connected. When a viewer becomes outraged, they are able to share the outraging product to hundreds of their connections through social media or direct links. This is a marketing technique which didn't exist before the the creation of social media.

Before social media

Before social media David would watch a TV show, he would see an ad that made him angry, when the ad made him angry he would get mad and stop watching TV or do something else, he would not talk to his co-workers and he would only talk to one of his friends about the horrible ad that made him angry. Today when David gets angry at a Youtube or Facebook ad, he has no where to go, but he can express himself by sharing his opinion of the horrible ad to his 500 friends he collected over the years. As a result David feels better about getting his opinions out in the open and his 500 friends on Facebook are now aware of the product David was mad about but may not share the same feelings as David, thanks to social media David can feel better about "venting" his feelings and the ad companies are happy to have an additional 500 people become aware of the product.

The main goal of marketing is not to make people aware of value in products

The goal is to create awareness. Awareness creates a bigger mass of people from which the product has potential to attract buyers. When marketing companies create shock in their viewers, they cause their viewers to spread messaging to their extended network, from this extended network there is a non zero chance that one of the connections will become a consumer of the product.

They know what they're doing

Marketing is heavily studied and analysed. Collectively billions are spent on figuring out how people react to messaging. No matter what social outcome they may seem to want, its clear that people are not happy with the messaging they're getting but the strategy of delivering these messages has not changed, this implies that this strategy is working as intended.