The Warshaw Curve of brand love

This is a story of lovers and haters.

A while back video producer Douglas Warshaw had an idea: Consumers seem to like extremes in video content, including a lot of low-end stuff (fuzzy home videos on YouTube) and also high-end stuff (the new HDTV, crystal-clear images seen on your big-screen TV in your basement). The stuff in the middle, the ho-hum content produced by local TV stations, was the video people were forgetting. Draw this demand and you get an inverted bell curve with a big dip in the middle.

We think this Warshaw Curve also fits how any range of consumers feel about your brand -- and being aware of this pattern is critically important. Imagine you took a survey of your customers and found, on average, the majority moderately like your product. On face value, this sounds good -- you have lukewarm goodwill and, as most brands do, room for improvement. But what if buried in your customer base were extremes of love and hate?

The curve above shows how a sentiment analysis of a brand might average with lukewarm affection, but have hidden extremes of customers who despise or adore you. Managing these extremes is what's important, because the haters can lead to sudden PR nightmares and the lovers can become your word-of-mouth fan base. Blogger Len Kendall noted recently that most social media sentiment rankings show neutral in the majority of consumer comments. Jay Leno is a perfect example: most viewers, according to social-media tracking service Trendrr, feel neutral about his TV show's performance. But the small fraction who think Jay has jumped the shark are creating a groundswell of negative buzz, and his ratings are down.

Be careful. Even if most of your customers are in neutral, your brand could be grinding gears.