If nobody hates your campaign, there’s a good chance nobody noticed it. In a world where beige gets ignored, bravery isn’t risky anymore. In his debut column, CMO of GymNation, Rory McEntee writes about why KFC and American Eagle got it right, and why Nike got it wrong. 

Why have brands become so afraid of doing something that might actually get people talking?

I’m not sure when it happened exactly but at some point, during my 20 years working in adland, marketing got scared of itself. Committees grew, and legal got a seat at the table. And playing it safe quietly became a KPI with more weight than mattered. It’s resulted in a wave of campaigns so polished, so pre-approved and diluted that nobody remembers them five minutes after seeing them.

But safe isn’t actually safe anymore. In a world where media and algorithms reward the extreme and bury the average, playing it safe and being “inoffensive” might as well be invisible. Beige brands don;t get hated - they get ignored, which is worse, because at least getting some hate means someone felt something. And marketing is all about evoking a feeling.

The brands you see winning right now aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleanest brand guidelines. They are the ones with fresh ideas that are willing to be a bit divisive, a bit uncomfortable or a bit out there. They don’t follow a traditional playbook that they know the board will approve. Yes it’s risky but they know that the riskiest ideas are more likely to make people stop scrolling and start talking. Bravery isn’t the risky strategy anymore. It’s the only strategy that still works.

Take KFC. They recently turned “Chicken Wine” - the internet’s nickname for a French rosé that had nothing to do with fried chicken - into a real pop-up wine bar in Shoreditch. Nobody asked for it but it went viral across socials and the internet because nobody could quite believe a fried chicken chain had done it. That’s the risk brave brands make, they’d rather risk being disliked than risk being forgotten.

Remember American Eagle’s “Great Jeans” campaign? If you had done a quick scroll through social media the week it launched, you’d have thought the brand had committed commercial suicide, with marketers lining up to call it tone-deaf, lazy, a flop. But despite their anger towards it, the results said otherwise: sold out product and close to a million new customers. No apology, no retraction, no quiet edit. They didn’t bow to the pressure, and the pressure turned out to be a much smaller crowd than the headlines suggested.

It’s fine if some people hate it

Most marketers will never admit it in public, but if your campaign gets a wave of comments telling you it’s a disgrace, that is not automatically a crisis. Sometimes it’s just proof you made something with an actual point of view. Give the internet enough time and it can find offensive associations in almost anything. Trust me, I know.

When we launched the Muscle Thobe - a performance-fabric take on traditional Gulf menswear - the comments section was a warzone. Plenty of people had opinions about a gym brand touching something cultural and sacred. I was very much aware of the comments but they were not our audience. 70% of our members are under 30. That’s who we serve, and that’s who showed up, selling out in 5 days. The people leaving angry comments were, overwhelmingly, not our members and were never going to be. Mistaking noise in the comments for the voice of your customer is one of the most expensive errors in marketing.

Yes, brands need to listen but that doesn’t mean handing the steering wheel to whoever can generate the most outrage. There’s a difference between listening and folding. If a piece of marketing genuinely reflects who you are and who you serve, a bit of shade from people outside that group isn’t a signal to retreat. It’s a signal you found the edge of your audience, which is exactly where interesting marketing lives.

Real bravery doesn’t disappear at the first complaint

What’s worse than being beige? Pretending to be brave for, like, 6 hours. It’s like a dog that barks and chases a cat, only to freeze and run away the moment it actually catches up. We’ve all watched a brand post something with an edge, get a hundred angry replies, and quietly delete it before lunch - followed by a statement about how the message “missed the mark”. Nike’s Boston Marathon sign this year did exactly that which says more about modern brand fear than modern brand creativity.

Real bravery means deciding in advance who the work is for, accepting that it won’t be for everyone, and having the balls to sit with the backlash instead of scrubbing it from the timeline within the hour. Deleting the post doesn’t undo the moment - it just adds “and then they panicked” making that a story in itself. Nike pulling the ad then was the story, not the ad itself which then ironically had more people searching for the ad to see how they f*cked up!

The only question that matters

Before your next campaign gets watered down into safety by the fifth round of sign- off, ask yourself: who is this actually for, and am I willing to let everyone else have an opinion about it? If the answer is yes, sign it off - and when the comments roll in, remember that most of the loudest critics were never going to buy from you anyway. The ones who matter are the ones who show up.

Rory McEntee is Chief Marketing Officer at GymNation, and the voice behind a regular dispatch on challenger brand marketing for those brave enough to read it.