• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, November 6, 2018

Trump. Kanye. Kaepernick. Miracle Whip.

What do these things all have in common? They’re polarizing. Just the mention of them probably stirs up strong feelings in you, one way or the other.

Wait. Miracle Whip?

Yep. Whether you love or hate Miracle Whip is perhaps the defining debate of our decade.

OK, maybe not. But it turns out that Miracle Whip — which I always thought of as the condiment counterpart to vanilla — is a polarized brand, according to an article in the Harvard Business Review.

And far from being aghast at the thought, Kraft Foods, the maker of Miracle Whip, embraced the polarization with gusto. The company embedded it into its marketing.

I have to ask: When did it become a bad thing to be vanilla? I happen to like vanilla. But I always order something else.

And there’s the rub. Vanilla is almost never our first choice, because we don’t like to be perceived as boring. Boring is the kiss of death for marketing. So even Miracle Whip, which is literally “boring” in a jar, is trying to “whip” up some controversy.

Our country is being split down the middle and driven to either side  — shoved to margins of outlier territory. Outrageous is not only acceptable. It’s become desirable. And marketing is partly to blame.

We marketers are enamored with this idea of “viralness.” We want advertising to be amplified through our target customer’s social networks. Boring never gets retweeted or shared.

That’s why polarization works. By moving to extremes, brands catch our attention. And as they move to extremes, they drag us along with them.

Increasingly, the brands we chose as our own identifying badges are moving away from any type of common middle ground. Advertising is creating a nation of ideological tribes that have an ever-increasing divide separating them.

The problem is that polarization works. Look at Nike. As Sarah Mahoney recently documented in a Marketing Daily post, the Colin Kaepernick campaign turned some impressive numbers for Nike.

Research from Kantar Millward Brown found these ads were particularly effective in piercing our ennui. The surprising part is that it did it on both sides of the divide. Based on Kantar’s Link evaluation, the ad scored in the top 15% of ads on something called “Power Contribution.” According to Kantar, that’s the ad’s “potential to impact long-term equity.” If we strip away the “market-speak” from this, that basically means the Kaepernick ads make them an excellent tribal badge to rally around.

If you’re a marketer, it’s hard to argue with those numbers. And Is it really important if half the world loves a brand, and the other half hates it?

I suspect it is. The problem comes when we look at exactly the same thing Kantar’s Link Evaluation measures: What is the intensity of feeling you have toward a brand?

The more intense the feeling, the less rational you are. And if the object of your affection lies in outlier territory, those emotions can become highly confrontational toward those on the other side of the divide. Suddenly, opinions become morals, and there is no faster path to hate than embracing a polarized perspective on morality.

The more emotionally charged marketing pushes us toward the edges, the harder it is to respect opinions that are opposed to our own.

This embracing of polarization in non-important areas — like which running shoes you choose to wear — increases polarization in other areas where it’s much more dangerous — like politics.

As if we haven’t seen enough evidence of this lately, polarized politics can cripple a country.

In a recent interview on NPR, Georgia State political science professor Jennifer McCoy listed three possible outcomes from polarization.

First, the country can enter polarization gridlock, where nothing can get done because there is a complete lack of trust between opposing parties.

Secondly, a polarization pendulum can occur, where power swings back and forth between the two sides and most of the political energy is expended undoing the initiatives of the previous government. Often there is little logic to this, other than the fact that the initiatives were started by “them” and not “us.”

Finally, one side can find a way to stay in power and then actively work to diminish and vanquish the other side by dismantling democratic platforms.

Today, as you vote, you’ll see ample evidence of the polarization of America. You’ll also see that at least two of the three outcomes of polarization are already playing out.

We marketers just have to remember that while we love it when a polarized brand goes viral, there may be another one of those unintended consequences lurking in the background.