Negativity Sells Media Publications, Positivity Sells Products, BOTH Sell Cryptocurrency!

Disclaimer: This is not financial or legal advice. The purpose is to open a discussion on cryptocurrency and marketing strategies.

We all know that if you put a negative headline, newspaper and magazine sales go up. A newspaper with only positive news does not sell. It is interesting then that brands and products sell when marketing is positive. So what happens with cryptocurrency?

There are always exceptions to every rule, Bitcoin sells no matter what the news because of the technological and ideological base it is built upon. Ethereum also seems to sell itself regardless of the news coverage. Alt (alternative) coins, excluding Ethereum, have a much harder time because of the many scams and ICO (Initial Coin Offering) failures of 2017.

So why is there such a discrepancy between marketing campaigns? Why should media sell when negativity is high and products when positivity is high? More interesting, which is the focus of this article, why does cryptocurrency sell no matter what the publicity?

Media

Attention, attention, attention! Like real estate, where location is everything, attention is the most important element of marketing. What catches our attention in media is negativity. It is intriguing that we seem be wired to pay attention to messages of negativity in the media. There are always exceptions to this rule, for example O-Magazine (Oprah’s publication), but they are few and far betwen, well I only know of 1, O-Magazine (lol).

Products

What catches our attention in the marketing of products is positivity. That is, if you are trying to sell food for a fast food restaurant and the buy line is, “try this, it is loaded with sugar and preservatives and it will make you fat”, you are going to fail. “We are second rate in relation to our closest competitor” will not work either if you are trying to sell a car for instance.

Products and the Competitive Marketing Edge

Competitive marketing is illegal in some countries, but in America is legal. What is competitive marketing? Simple, I compare my brand to yours and say why mine is superior. It is in America that you see just how far some companies will go to use the power of competitive marketing.

To illustrate just how powerful competitive marketing is, we are going to side track for just a moment and look at the opposite. The case of the car campaign in South Africa. South African law prohibits competitive advertising, so when BMW and Mercedes-Benz went on a marketing war, the BMW campaign was finally shut down because it blurred the competitive marketing law so much. Mercedes-Benz ran an advert on television where the true story was told of how the Mercedes-Benz kept the passengers safe and they were able to survive when their car went off the side of a mountain. BMW jumped on the Mercedes-Benz advert and put out an advert of a car handling a mountain pass with the buy line, “BMW beats the bends”. It was very clever because the point was that if the people had been travelling in a BMW, they would not have gone off the road in the first place. BMW ended up withdrawing their advertisements because their marketing “damage” was done to Mercedes-Benz already and the extra publicity from the Mercedes-Benz legal action was only to BMW’s advantage because it drove the point home (pun intended!). This is the power of competitive marketing.

Cryptocurrency and Media Coverage

And now for something completely different!

Bitcoin and Ethereum benefit from just about any advertising because it piques the interest of the people. By far Bitcoin benefits the most and is fast becoming a hose-hold name. This is because when the media reports anything on Bitcoin, most people do not know what it is. The more often Bitcoin is seen in the media, the more likely a person is to be curious about what it is. If this reaches a critical mass, then the person is likely to research Bitcoin. So why would this make a difference?

Well, the technology and ideology that Bitcoin is based upon is so revolutionary and intriguing, that it has the ability to sell itself. This means that it only takes a critical amount of exposure to the term “Bitcoin” to make you research it and then you are highly likely to invest. It is similar with Ethereum, but you usually need to be in the Bitcoin game for a while before you realize Ethereum’s potential.

As stated other alt coins are harder to market because of the 2017 explosion of crytpocurrencies on the cryptomarket. While this is true and has had a negative effect on the projects with quality products, the effect is wearing off because only quality products are left from the 2017 ICO boom, such as COTI (Currency of the Internet). So it is actually positive for any company that started then that is still around now.

Summary

Negativity bombards us daily in the media. Positivity bombards us daily in the world of product marketing. Cryptocurrency benefits from both. This is because cryptocurrency is a revolution of the fintech space. At least while Cryptocurrency is disrupting the financial and technological space, it will benefit from all types of marketing because of the exposure it gets in the media.