How much should you fear brand haters?
Lots of marketers worry about brand haters. I mean, they sure seem vocal, especially on the socials. And word-of-mouth is important.
But 99% of the time, haters aren’t your biggest issue.
The good folks at @CivicScience surveyed over 27,000 people about their opinions of Dick’s Sporting Goods and R.E.I. (the 2nd and 11th largest sporting goods retailers — in the world).
It turns out, haters are usually dwarfed by the indifferent: people who have no opinion or never heard of you.
In Dicks’ case, while 17% of people said they had a bad opinion of them, 51% said they had NO OPINION of the brand. Another 5% said “Uh, who?” (That’s 3.3X more, for those keeping score.)
R.E.I. was even starker: 4% had a bad opinion, 27% had NO opinion, and 58% had never even HEARD of them (21X).
This makes some sense, since R.E.I. is about 1/3 the size of Dick’s.
So if you want to grow, go after that much bigger group of people.
And chill about haters. After all, even U2 has ‘em. And they’re playing SPHERE for, oh, $4MM — a night.
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