How you market your products will determine how successful they are. It’s a sad fact, but the quality of the product is often irrelevant, or at least significantly less important than the quality and effectiveness of the marketing strategies used to promote it. We have seen this employed hundreds of thousands of times (anyone remember the “Swiffer”, which was little more than a glorified duster).

When it comes down to promotion, there are dozens of different marketing strategies and promotional techniques that can be used to get your product the attention of the buying public. The Rich Jerk used one type of marketing, anti-marketing, to amazing results. For nearly two years just about every popular website had a Rich Jerk advertisement on it, and they were easy to point out.

What is Anti-Marketing?

Most forms of marketing try to employ persuasive techniques to get you interested in buying the product. They do this by showing you positive attributes of the product as they try to build a positive reputation with prospective consumers. You see this type of marketing every day on TV, the internet, and radio.

Anti-marketing works by spinning the traditional marketing techniques - the usual positive persuasive messages - and making a persuasive message by saying the opposite of what you’d expect. The Rich Jerk used this type of marketing exclusively, and the message was received loud and clear by thousands of customers.

Need examples?

• “I’m Better Than You”- This tag line became the slogan of the Rich Jerk, and it was used in just about every creative image and affiliate website they produced. In fact, it was on the top-left corner of their sales page, blurted out by a cartoon “Rich Jerk” logo. The message here, at first glance, doesn’t seem to bring any type of value or use to their marketing. If anything, it comes off self-indulgent and pompous, right? In fact, once the user was exposed to a few more marketing messages, it established credibility.

  It screamed I am a rich, arrogant jerk and I make millions online. To someone who was beginning to see the value in the Rich Jerk, it established authority. It said that the Rich Jerk made money, and you didn’t. It also offered the possibility of being able to elevate yourself to the Rich Jerks status through the purchase of the Rich Jerk eBook.

• “You’re pathetic”- This exact statement, along with numerous variations of it, is used constantly throughout the sales page, accompanying e-mails, and marketing creatives/advertisements. First and foremost, it’s an insult. However, it furthers the credibility that the Rich Jerk has already established (with the million dollar websites, remember?).

  The reader will begin to feel self-pity as they realize that there are people out there making the kind of money they’ve only dreamed about, and soon that self-pity will lead to hope as they begin to think that the Rich Jerks eBook may be a possible solution to their financial problems. If you are a subscriber of the Rich Jerk mailing list, you have probably noticed that the Rich Jerk commonly refers to its subscribers as “losers” (and other derogatory terms).

• Foul Language - The Rich Jerk employs language that many people would not expect to see from a professional or authoritative website. A small amount of censorship is employed (f*ck appears many, many times), but the general language is rather cursive.

  This makes sense, as the language fits in with the anti-marketing mechanics employed by the Rich Jerk. If a reader has bought into the authority status of the Rich Jerk, this element once again cements that authority into their mind.

What We Can Learn From This Type of Marketing

Before you get ideas that you can use this type of marketing strategy, you need to consider the type of product that you are promoting. The Rich Jerk branded itself this way from day one, and everything from the language it uses to the design of the fictional “Rich Jerk” character further establishes this brand.

In the same way that Coke has established itself as refreshment, and is now recognized as the defacto term for Cola, the Rich Jerk has done a good job of establishing itself as a resource for valid internet marketing information.

If you have a product that may be marketed in this way, try split testing your current campaign with a campaign that focuses on anti-marketing: you never know what the results may be.

In the next article in the case study I will provide some examples on how you can employ this type of marketing, and go through a few examples in detail.