Polarizing vs Alienating — Why Most Brands Can't Tell the Difference

All right guys, welcome back to another episode of Running with Wolves and I'm really excited for this week's episode because I know I say that literally every single week and you're probably mouthing in your car. Welcome back to Running with Wolves. I'm so excited for this week's episode. It's fine if you are whatever. At least I'm in your head. That's all that matters, right? But this week I am really excited because we are going to talk about something that happened last month by the time you're listening to this and that is the Emma Greed Wall Street Journal very, very sexist, terrible marketing headline that happened. But I want to talk about how, obviously, the Wall Street Journal kind of shot themselves in the foot a little bit with this marketing snafu. And then on top of that, I want to talk about actually how Emma Greed is doing a fantastic job basically leveraging bad marketing or poor journalism into pretty insane sales for her book because I get questions from founders a lot of like, oh my god, there's like negative stuff that's happening online about me. I had, you know, one of my founders, I had to have like an emergency call with her. She was like, I'm getting canceled online and like all this different stuff. She was fine. Anyways, we, she wasn't actually getting canceled. We worked through it. But regardless, I think a lot of founders are very fearful of negative marketing, things being spread about them, bad PR stuff like that. And I hate that the old adage of like, there is no such thing as bad press, like all press is good press. I hate that I kind of agree with that. But with nuance, with context, in my opinion, I think that all press, all marketing, all talk about your brand is good as long as you understand marketing and sales as long as you actually understand how with your marketing to take anything negative that is being spread about you and shift it into your favor to actually generate more sales. And I think Emma Greed is a fantastic example of how to do that. So we're going to really talk through kind of like what happened number one, number two, why this was such a bad marketing ploy on the Wall Street journals side. And then how Emma Greed is now shifting that to further her book sales. And kind of how you guys can do that as founders moving forward as well. And this really goes for like any, I would say like marketing strategy, any industry, any business model, this is really going to work for you. So it doesn't matter if you are making six figures a year all the way up to nine figures a year. This is absolutely going to be a conversation that pertains to you. So like I said, last month, the Wall Street Journal published a profile on Emma Greed pretty much right ahead. I think it was about a week, maybe five days ahead of her book launching. And I, there are very few moments now with marketing that surprised me from brands. When I tell you guys, I read this headline and I no joke, my jaw like dropped. I was like, this is insane. Like, am I the only one that thinks that this is insane that the Wall Street Journal published this headline? Maybe it's just because again, I'm like so far gone into the marketing and sales like rabbit hole. But I was like this had to go through so many layers of approval. Like how did we think that this was a good idea? So the headline that they led with, which mind you, if you don't know who I'm talking about, who Emma Greed is, number one, do your research. Number two, read her book. It's absolutely fantastic. I'm about halfway through. She is the co-founder of Schemes at a four billion valuation. Okay. So she co-founded Schemes with Kim Kardashian. She co-founded Good American with Chloe Kardashian at a 200 million in annual revenue. She is one of the richest self-made women in America and she is the kind of operator that the female readership of the Wall Street Journal is aspiring to be like, right? Like she's very much someone that they would look up to. And the headline that the Wall Street Journal led with was the Kardashian whisperer who says three hours with her kids is enough. I wish that like you guys were here to talk about this with me because when I tell you my jaw dropped, I mean it. Okay. They took a billion dollar operator in front of an audience of female founders, executives, decision makers and reduced her to a parenting debate, which is the exact tension and experience that every single woman, whether they are in corporate, whether they're a founder, it does not matter. That is something that we navigate as women in the workforce every single day. It's like, oh, well, if you're going on this work trip, like who's watching your kids, right? This is not new, unfortunately to us as women. This is not a new conversation. This is something that again, we have had to navigate all the time, but to see it publicized and like weaponized in a headline, not as commentary, but like as clickbait from a trusted publication like the Wall Street Journal was actually insane to me. Okay. And here's what most of you watched happen and kind of missed entirely. You scrolled the LinkedIn drag, you nodded along, you're like a classic Wall Street Journal, right? And then you went back to your own marketing on Monday morning and you did the exact same thing. Okay. You wrote a hook that crossed your buyer's values and you called it bold or polarizing. You shipped a campaign that alienated the exact person that you're trying to convert and again called it polarizing. You signed off on a piece of content your team called quote unquote edgy and you didn't have a framework to know whether edgy was building your sales vote or if it was basically burning it, right? You don't know the difference between polarizing and alienating. And in 2026, that one distinction I actually think is the difference between a brand that compounds trust and a brand that very quickly bleeds the buyer. It needs the most. And it's why I so consistently talk about understanding your target audiences world and having conversations that play into their experiences. Okay. So a really fantastic example of who did this so well was sonic. Okay. So if any of you guys love Bravo, trash reality TV, any of those things, I absolutely love that shit. Okay. So for example, for those of you who know what's happening in the Bravo world right now, there is summer house drama that's happening and Sierra Miller is at the center of it. A couple years ago, it was the scandal, Vanderpump rules situation that happened. Ariana Maddox was at the center of that. And she since has gotten her claim to fame with like all these different projects that she's worked on after the fact she's absolutely fantastic. But sonic played into the conversations that it knows its target audience is having by immediately after this whole summer house drama happened. They had Ariana Maddox and Sierra Miller in an ad together and they were like almost making fun of it. They're like, nothing crazy has been happening recently. You know, like I've just been literally off of social media enjoying my like sonic refresher or whatever, right? So it was like an ad placement. But what made it so fantastic is that sonic was playing into the conversations that its viewership or readership or any of those things its consumers were constantly talking about. And so as somebody who consumes Bravo is like, I'm going to go into sonic or whatever. I'm going to go get a sonic refresher. It keeps it top of mind. But it also is like sonic gets us, right? We love sonic. We trust sonic because sonic plays into the conversations that we're having all the time. And like it knows game basically, right? Like that's the that's the commentary I've been seeing on the internet. The reality though is that again Wall Street Journal did the exact opposite. And so you can actually use your marketing to build so much more trust and obsession with your brand or you can use it to deteriorate the trust of your target audience. And that's what Wall Street Journal did. So like I said, I'm going to walk you through exactly where the line is. And then we're basically going to talk about what Wall Street Journal did wrong. What Emma did right? Because the same moment produced two very totally different results, right? It kind of led to a ton of public criticism for good reason for the Wall Street Journal. And then Emma turned this into an opportunity for more book sales. So like how can the same marketing moment create two very different experiences for two very different brands? But before we get into that really quick for those of you who are listening, the reason why this is important, because if you're like, Spana, I do not have time to be listening to a case study on the Wall Street Journal and emigrate. Yeah, you fucking do. Okay, this is important because whether you are someone who is a six figure business owner, all the way up to a nine figure business owner or a CEO, you have been told over and over again that the brands winning right now are the brands that have a unique point of view that polarization drives growth that the safe content is what's killing brands. And all of that is true. So I'm not debating that, but it's also only half the picture. Okay? Because the brands that confused polarizing, quote unquote, "with we need to be edgy" are the [BLANK_AUDIO] that oftentimes have crossed their audience's values. Another example of this, which again, this is when I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around is the free-to-baby scandal that happened. We talked about this on a podcast last month, okay? The free-to-baby scandal is, free-to-baby is a baby product brand, okay? Trusted by parents and they were doing an ad of a rectal thermometer and they made a threesome joke in that context, which was absolutely insane to me. And that's why I was saying I have a really hard time wrapping my mind around how someone thought that that was edgy versus just being polarizing. But clearly there is a very murky line here between like edgy and polarizing. So we need to have that conversation, okay? They're confusing. These brands are confusing engagement with trust. They're confusing saves and shares for brand building. They're confusing virality for what's actually going to drive sales. They've optimized for a number that does not tell them which direction the brand is moving. Okay, and then like I said last month, the Wall Street Journal made that like textbook version of a mistake in front of all of us. So before I tell you kind of exactly why what they did was a marketing failure, I'm actually gonna tell you what I thought about it. Because if I skipped that, I would pretty much be doing the exact same thing that I'm about to call you out for. I'd be optimizing for like safe content over content that aligns with my audience actually values. So here it is very plain and simple. What Wall Street Journal did was very sexist period. Okay, no one is going to lead a profile on a male CEO worth $300 million with how many hours he spends with his kids in that headline. Point blank period, I'm sorry. That's not going to happen. Like name one male CEO that they're gonna do that too. Okay, the framing wouldn't survive the first pitch meeting at Wall Street Journal. I'd be like, no, that's a dumb idea. Okay, it wouldn't get past the first edit. It wouldn't be published the fact that this framing made it through three editors at a publication that covers business at the highest level is not only a values failure, but also a marketing failure. And they're not separate. And so because of that, I have a really hard time imagining that this was not intentional. Okay, Emma Greed is one of the operator stories. In my opinion of this decade, she is very similar to I think what Steve Jobs was in the early 2000s. Okay, she's self made, she has a $4 billion company, 200 million product brand built one of the most recognized fashion brands in modern history. And Wall Street Journal had the opportunity to anchor her in the league that she is currently playing in. They had the opportunity to publish a profile that would have shifted how female founders are seen at scale. Like this could have been one of the most kick ass profiles on a founder that Wall Street Journal has done. They had a platform big enough to make it matter. And in my opinion, and oh, also the fucking craziest part about all of this is that article was written by a woman. That article was written by a woman. They wasted this interview on the laziest framing that there is. Okay, and the female readership that they depend on, I did my research and female readership makes up about 40% of the Wall Street Journal's readership in general. Okay, I think it was maybe 37%, but I'm rounding up. So that is almost half of their readership are female founders, you guys. And like I said, they depend on them. They're paying for a subscription. The one that their advertisers are trying to reach, that reader noticed, she noticed the headline. Okay, she noticed the same way she noticed every time society has reduced a billion dollar operator to a parenting question. While the male operator that sits next to her gets profiled on his vision and his strategy, and I actually posted this on Instagram a couple of weeks ago, but to be totally frank, unfortunately, because I talk all day every day to female and male founders, what a male founder is going to pitch as far as his strategy and his vision, and that is applauded and put on to like this magic pillar unfortunately, oftentimes is a watered down version of what I hear from female founders, honestly, because we've had to fight for so long to get our ideas and our vision and our strategy to be seen as credible that we've had to do the extra work to come along with it. And so for me, that's the incredibly frustrating part is that Wall Street Journal has a responsibility in my opinion, just like any brand who has part of their target audience, their readership, their consumers, being female founders, they had this opportunity and in my opinion, this responsibility to champion a woman who has created so much incredible success in her time as an opportunity to make real societal changes for how we see female founders and just women in the workplace in general, but especially driven women and especially women who are really succeeding in their careers, like that is how you make real change, how you impact real changes, how large publications or people who have a massive stage or audience or presence as a brand, being able to put out like their opinions and showing people what is possible so that we change the questions that we're asking, but they played into the same lazy narrative and crossed the values of a very large portion of their readership, okay? So let's kind of break down the problem and the pattern that I'm seeing here. There are two strategies that look the same from a distance that are actually opposites. They both create attention, they both create comments, they both look like a quote-unquote win in your metrics and your data, but they produce completely different outcomes for your brand over 12 to 24 months. One strategy is polarizing, one strategy is alienating, okay? Polarizing is a take that splits opinion on something your audience cares about, okay? So for example, a quote-unquote polarizing opinion that I actually have, and I've said this to my clients, to my viewers, to my listeners, many, many times, but my polarizing opinion about marketing and sales is that you actually shouldn't even post at all. You shouldn't even be marketing if you do not have a marketing strategy that is rooted in your target audiences market research, data, and sales psychology, because in my opinion, you're just going to continue posting content, writing emails that do nothing for you that we need those little wins, right? When it comes to our marketing, like we need to see the numbers going up to be like, okay, the effort that I'm putting in is actually worth it. The reality is that when you don't have a strategy, you don't get those little quick wins, and your marketing that you've poured all of this time and effort and maybe even money and energy into creates no results for you. So until you actually get a strategy, I would rather you not market at all, okay? That is something that is going to split opinions of my target audience, but that is not something that crosses their values. That's something where I'm gonna get people being like, yeah, I totally agree, and then I'm gonna get people that are like, well, no, because consistency creates a habit and blah, blah, blah, blah, because trust me, I've been there, I've had those conversations, okay? That is polarizing. That is not something that is alienating, because no one in my target audience would look at that and be like Savannah, how dare you say that about me, right? That's not going to be offensive. That is not like quote unquote mean girl marketing, okay? And engages with a real debate inside the room your audience is already in. People will defend it, people will argue with it, right? That's the entire point. Either way, your audience is engaged with the substance of what you're talking about and the brand is being built because the brand has shown it has a real spine on something that audiences care about, okay? Alienating, so the opposite of this, this is what crosses your audience's values, okay? Alienating is a take that like I said, crosses your audience's values, not like they quote unquote disagree with this, they wouldn't even associate with somebody like this, okay? They share to drag, not to debate, they quietly stop trusting you, they don't unfollow loudly, they unfollow in their heads, okay? So like the difference is not the volume of the engagement, the difference is the direction of the trust. Polarizing pulls your highest value buyer closer to your brand. Alienating pushes your highest value buyer out of the room and into the comment section kind of dragging you or worse into unfollowing you and into silence. And people are far more likely to talk about something that they are pissed off about than something that they actually enjoy. And so you also run the risk of people talking shit about your brand, word of mouth travels very fast you guys. Even in the day and age of AI, even in the day and age of social media, word of mouth travels fast, people talk shit, whether you know it or not. So if you choose to put out something that's alienating and crosses your audience's values, please do not be surprised if they talk about you online or in person. And there is more, especially because of cancel culture now, there is so much more in my opinion that will happen as far as consequences to your brand than people just unfollowing you. Okay, so let me tell you what most operators are doing right now because if I don't say this clearly to you guys, I actually don't think that anyone will. You think that you're being polarizing. You are being lazy, okay? You are confusing a quote unquote edgy hook with a real point of view. You're confusing, I made someone mad with I made someone think. You're letting the team rubber stamp [BLANK_AUDIO] because it tested well in a focus group of seven people. You're optimizing for the engagement metric. And you're not auditing whether the engagement is your buyer leaning in or your buyer leaning out. Okay. So you're like, oh my god, look, our post got a thousand comments. If all of those comments are like, what the fuck? Like this sucks. Hello, that's clearly not good. You can't just be like, oh my god, look, our engagement is up. We're successful. It doesn't matter. It does not matter if people are talking shit. Okay. Wall Street Journal confused these two strategies last month in public at scale. They thought they were running a polarizing headline. But the headline split the room. People argued engagement was up. The traffic team probably was like, oh my god, we're doing so amazing. Read the room, babes. Read the fucking room. Okay. The room they alienated was the room that they actually needed the most. And I know, I know that some of you guys are going to comment on this and be like, that's not true because look, you're talking about it. And you're spreading it to all of your audience. So like clearly, it's actually successful. Wall Street Journal accomplished exactly what they want to accomplish. Yeah, probably until that they see that their subscriptions are down by 30% next quarter. The only metric that matters is not visibility. It's not engagement. It's not people talking about your brand. In today's day and age, it's actually like your currency that should matter to you the most is the trust with your brand and the conversion rate at which you actually get people from your audience to buy from you. And a lot of that is really difficult to scale when you are constantly crossing your target audience's values. Okay. Now that we've kind of talked about what was happening, when it comes to addressing something like this with an actual client of mine, for example, right? There are typically three problems that I see that are causing this scenario. None of them get fixed by hiring a quote unquote punchier copywriter. None of them get fixed by booking another brand strategy. They are structural and until you fix this structure, you're going to keep crossing your buyer's values with content you thought was bold. When in actuality, it was more so crossing their values. Like I said, and you're going to keep losing trust on a delay that you can't see. Until one day, you're going to wake up and be like, "Hi, hello, where the hell are our sales?" And it's because a quarter ago, you broke your audience's trust. So problem number one is that you know your buyer's demographics. You don't know your buyer's values. Okay. So you have a customer profile. It's probably from 2018. If I'm going to be honest with you based on what I've seen, maybe it got a refresh in 2022 post-COVID. Who knows? It tells you your buyer's age. Their income, their role, geography, surface behaviors. That's a marketing brief. I've seen it. Any other like quote unquote marketing and sales expert has seen it. Okay. That's not a values map. You and even when you're talking about not just like values, but people's experiences, which is another thing to play into here, right? Like you want to be playing into your target audience's experiences so that you can trigger that sales psychology tactic called identity that we've talked about before, right? When you trigger identity, it means your target audience feels seen and understood by your brand, which builds their trust, the opposite of what we're talking about, and gets them to want to buy from you faster. And only you. Okay. Not your competitors. Not somebody else. Not a different investment. You and you alone. The brands, I would say, building real brands, real sales, real revenue right now, have a values and experiences map for their target demographic. Okay. They've documented what their buyer believes, what their audience is exhausted by, what their buyer would defend in a common thread, right? What their buyer would quietly unfollow them for, what their buyer gets reduced to by every other brand in their category, what their buyer would feel betrayed by, even if they couldn't articulate it into words. Wall Street Journal has a 130-year-old reader profile. They have zero values map for the female executive that they need to retain in their readership. Okay. They guessed, and they guessed wrong. The female reader they depend on has been reduced to a parenting question for probably her entire career. And truthfully, it's not something that holds me back from having kids, but I already mentally prepare myself for when I do have kids. That being a question that I'm going to get asked consistently, which is just so insane to me, right? But that same female reader that they depend on who's been reduced to a parenting question her entire career picked Wall Street Journal as the publication that wouldn't do that, which is why she pays money to subscribe to read all of their articles or reports or things like that. But unfortunately, Wall Street Journal actually did what they thought they wouldn't do. Most of you are guessing in the exact same way. You don't have a written documented values or experiences map for your highest value buyer, okay? So every single bold or quote-unquote polarizing opinion or creative decision that you make for your brand is a coin flip. We leave it up to guessing, okay? And you guys know, because I say this all the time, when it comes to marketing and sales, we don't guess. We know because we do the research. We look at the data, we do the digging. So that not only do we have to guess on what would or wouldn't break our target audience's trust, but we don't have to guess on what would or would not create sales at scale, okay? Like, everyone likes to pretend that marketing and sales is some big puzzle that we need to figure out when it's actually an open book test. That's the craziest part of it all is like literally just look at the book. Like, how do you fail an open book test? Guys, I fear the answer was in front of us all along. You just didn't know how to find the answer or execute the answer, okay? And without that map, without that values and experiences map, without that documented, the reality is you don't have an actual brand. You have marketing that has really great vibes, but you can't predict what quote-unquote polarizing take. Your buyers will absolutely love and you'll win because of or that they'll hate and take as an insult and unfollow you and your brand is gonna crash and burn. Like, you are still playing this guessing game of trying to figure out what's gonna work well for your audience or not when you really don't have room to be guessing right now. Problem number two, your dashboard, your metrics, your data, is actually lying to you. Engagement is value agnostic, okay? So if you have a post that gets 8,000 shares because it's brilliant, it looks identical on your dashboard in your metrics when you're looking at your data to a post that got 8,000 quotes tweets absolutely roasting the fuck out of your brand, okay? Engagement metrics do not tell you which direction your audience is moving, love or hate. All they tell you is that they're moving. So your team is celebrating numbers that don't tell them whether the brand is being built or eroded. Wall Street Journal probably had a quote-unquote great traffic day when the headline ran just like they thought that they would. So their data, their dashboard, their metrics turned green. Somewhere in their analytics meeting, someone was pointing to those being like, oh my god, look at how amazing we're doing and counting it as a win. But they were measuring volume. They weren't measuring direction. They lost trust, this is the crazy part with the readership or the person of their readership that they spend millions of dollars every single year to actually retain, okay? And that trust typically has a delay when it shows up in your sales metrics, your sales data. It won't show up in your next monthly report. So they're not going to see that their subscriptions dipped like immediately next month. And if they do, it's going to be a very small percentage but it's going to be a gradual decline. And in six months, they're going to look up and say, where did 40% of our readership go? And they will be able to trace it back to that one moment. Your brand is doing the exact same thing. Your team pulls engagement reports. Engagement reports are vanity metrics, you guys. They are vanity numbers. When they aren't paired with sentiment, retention, repeat purchase and trust signals, most of you are not pairing them. You do not know what your data is actually telling you. And I see this every single day. Because when people come to me, they hear me talk all the time about diagnosing your data, using your data to inform your marketing strategy. And they're like, if looked at my data, here's what it's telling me. So here's how I've shifted my strategy. And my job is to very gently let them down and tell them that's actually not what your data is saying. That's actually not what it's saying, unfortunately. And so you just structured an entire strategy around a wrong assumption, OK? So the reality is that you are looking at one number and you are calling it like the post check for how healthy your brand is as far as trust goes with your audience. Brand damage does not show up in your analytics or your data. It shows up six months later in a launch that underperforms and no one can explain why. Problem number three is that you don't have an audience values filter or experiences filter on your marketing review. You review your marketing for tone and grammar and design. you ask, is it on brand, you don't review for, does this break our audience's trust? Does it cross their values? And without that filter, especially in the day and age that we are living in, where AI is writing everyone in their mother's marketing. Okay, especially in this day and age, without that filter, lazy hooks, lazy marketing, all lazy writing will eventually slip through the cracks. Okay, and the Wall Street Journal headline made it past, I want you to really think about this. Three editors, okay? Three, because no one had the explicit job of asking, does this alienate the readership that we need the most? Okay, the headline was punchy, sure, it was clicky. If it didn't talk about her as a parent, I'd be like, "Yeah, that's amazing." Right? It tested as bold in some internal meeting, and everyone signed off on it because there was no values filter installed in the editorial process. So of course, it got published. The same thing is happening in your internal meetings, whether it's like you talking to your board, which is you yourself and you, or it's you talking to your massive team of 10 people, 20 people who are on your marketing and sales team. Your CMO is telling your social media manager to draft a hook, your head of content thinks it's super bold, the CMO thinks it's on brand, everyone signs off. No one asks the values question, so it goes live, and then a month later, your inquiries are quieter than you could have literally ever imagined, and you cannot figure out why. Or let's say you are a solo prettyward, you know, doing a skincare brand, and you're making a million dollars a year. Your website traffic suddenly spikes and then drops, and then you cannot figure out why your sales are dwindling. That is what happens, the values filter is one question, the experience filter is one question. Okay, it's literally a single sentence, and it takes 30 seconds to apply and almost no one is applying it because the team thinks it's cool and cool on brand covers it. It's a non issue because our team thinks it's on brand. It doesn't brand and values are not the same thing. That is what's broken, and the fix is not, oh, just be more cautious, oh, just be more careful. The fix is structural, it's strategic, you have to install that like buyer values or experiences map, you install the values filter, you audit engagement against direction, not just volume. Okay, so you should not be sitting here looking at how much engagement are we getting? You should be asking yourself, what caliber of engagement are we getting? This also goes for people who are getting a shit ton of comments that are like, amazing, love this. I'm like, your audience isn't actually engaged, those are probably just bots or people who are trying to leverage your platform to get in front of more people engaging for their own personal agenda. Okay, that is not meaningful engagement. That's not people saying like, wow, this really shifted my thought process and it made me realize ABC that those two things are not the same. So you could get 20 comments on a post that are all surface level and not genuine engagement or you could get 20 comments on a post that is genuine engagement. But if you're just looking at the volume of engagement, that's not going to tell you anything. Okay, so once you do all of that, then your bold content actually compounds the trust for your audience instead of quietly draining it. So let's kind of talk about how to make that happen in your marketing. The shift that you need to make and what you need to realize is from optimizing for attention to optimizing for trust and conversions attention is what gets you in the door. It's what gets you recommended by AI. We just talked about that in another episode, right? Attention and visibility and brand recognition and SEO are all things that will get you in the door. It's not what makes the buyer choose you. That is trust. Okay, polarization when done right actually builds both polarization done wrong burns the second one to basically fuel the first one. They burned trust to fuel attention. And even though their metrics probably looked fantastic, the brand will actually continue to get smaller because of that. So operating system, like I said before for marketing is not just be safer safer brands are dying. That's why I said in the beginning of this episode, like I'm not trying to say that that is not true. That is absolutely true, but there's nuance to it. Okay. So safe brands are dying. The new operating system is be values aware. And I think that that's also something that we have seen in today's day and age, not just in marketing, not just in brands, not just in being a business owner, but just how people are operating. They only want to associate with people who have the same values as them. It's not about like anything else that's external, what it comes down to is like, do we align on fundamental values, do we align on what's right and wrong. And that is carrying over into how people are consuming and buying from brands. They only want to consume and buy from brands where they feel like they align as far as values. Your buyer wants you to have a spine. It's not that they don't they love when you post like polarizing opinions like you do. However, what they don't want you to do is to insult what they stand for in service of your engagement metric. Okay. And there's a phrase that I want you to write down. And this is something that I remember constantly, which is polarized the substance, protect the values. Okay. So pick a real fight inside what your audience cares about. Take a side, hold it. That is polarizing. It's also correct. Okay. Don't pick a fight with what your audience cares about. Don't reduce them to a stereotype. Okay. Don't insult what they're navigating. Don't weaponize like their lived experience for engagement. Don't turn what they're tired of being reduced to into your work. Don't polarize the substance, protect the values. That is very, very simple. Okay. Once that role is installed every other tactical decision gets so easy because you have something to kind of cross check it with basically you have checks and balances right your hook either polarizes the substance or it doesn't your campaign either protects the values of your target audience or it doesn't when you do that. That's because that your brand becomes legible to itself and the buyer recognizes the brand pretty much instantly the trust compounds and your sales build. So let's kind of talk about the frameworks I install within every single brand. Okay. Polarizing engages your audiences substance alienating insults your audiences identity. You have to memorize the difference. Okay. We've kind of already talked about the difference. So what I want you to do when you're testing this in real time is ask yourself like does this take engage with what my audience actually cares about or does it insult what they already care about engages equals polarizing insults equals alienating. Wall Street Journal really failed that test female executives are exhausted by being reduced to a parenting framing and Wall Street Journal took one of the most successful leaders and operators that they look up to and did that exact same thing. That's not a take inside the conversation that is a fight with their readers identity. Okay. So that's why it really went against their values. Okay. Kind of shift into how emigrid is doing this really, really well. Because like I said, when someone crosses your audiences values leverage that moment. This is the emigrid move. I did this. When was it? I think it was a couple years ago back when Harrison but her from the fricking chiefs or whatever was making that graduation speech and was basically sitting there talking to like female college graduates. And we're like, you guys shouldn't be aspiring to this. You should aspire to find husbands and be in the kitchen. So I made a piece of marketing that basically talked about how after Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift got together in the chiefs were getting such fantastic like press and it was actually bringing so many more women into like the NFL. Like the NFL, they were enjoying football more things like that, allowing someone on your team by proxy to essentially ruin the brand image of the chiefs by like associating his beliefs with the chiefs was a really poor marketing and PR move. And of course, every loser man living in their mom's basement at 42 years old eating a bag of flaming hot cheetos was like, you don't know what you're talking about. But guess what? They're not my target audience. So I don't care. My target audience is women who agree with me female founders who are like, yeah, who actually also understand and appreciate the fact that I broke that down, not from like a sexism point of view, but more so from a marketing point of view. And they're like, yes, completely agree. They're aligned with their values. It created engagement, it created a debate about the marketing itself. And it also allowed my audience to almost like get into that fight with me against these other people in the comments. It caused a ton more like inquiries and applications to work with me because they were like, not only do I love how you broke that down from a marketing standpoint, but I love the values and what you stand for. Right? So that was something that I did and it very much worked for me and it's obviously working for Emma Greed as well. Wall Street Journal crossed their female executive readers values. We've already covered this, right? Emma Greed's audience overlaps with that audience, which is exactly why they did a profile on her in the first place, okay? It overlaps with their readership at scale. Emma already had a platform, a book that was launching, and a clear position on what just happened. So she really hasn't stayed quiet. She didn't manufacture a feud. She didn't bait engagement. She stepped into that moment with a lot of conviction. So I actually also really admire how she handled it. She really didn't speak to the Wall Street Journal. She wasn't like, yeah, how terrible of them to do that to me or to create that headline. They're a sexist outlet, any of those things. She took that exact same moment and she used the attention to point her audience towards her actual book and used it as a talking point. It was like, this is actually some of the exact same things I talk about in my book and I talk about how I've been able to overcome these things. I talk about X, Y, Z. And so she was basically saying, hey, if you have an issue with Wall Street Journal saying this about me, this is actually the entire point that I've been trying to make with some of my book. Here's my stance on this. And if you wanna hear more about that, go read my book. And if you wanna know how to overcome this. So instead of just being like, yeah, fuck you Wall Street Journal, she took it as a talking point because it was something that her target audience was already infuriated about and used it to leverage sales, okay? That's the exact same marketing moment that I was talking about with two very different outcomes. Wall Street Journal took attention and lost trust, Emma took attention and converted it, okay? So that is a very teachable principle. The reality is that you need to be ready and when a moment happens that your audience cares about you have kind of three options for how to handle it in your marketing. Option one, which is stay quiet. You miss the leverage. Your audience notices that you don't show up. That's why when the whole Roe v. Wade overturn happened and there were very specific brands who primarily support women, whether they were e-commerce brands, service-based brands, women everywhere, okay? Who were not speaking up about it. I'm like, this is directly impacting your target audience and you're not gonna talk about it. Your audience notices your silence more than they notice what you say in my opinion, okay? Option number two, which is jumping with a hot take about you, not them, which means that you oftentimes look a little bit opportunistic and your audience can tell, okay? And so the trust softens that much more. Option number three is speak with conviction in alignment with your audience's values, which is exactly what I did in that TikTok that we were just talking about. That's exactly what Emma did, okay? Speak from the position you have already established. Use the attention to point your audience towards what you are actually building. Also notice that Emma never once made that about her. She wasn't saying like, yeah, it really hurt my feelings and like I felt really insulted and blah, blah, blah. She just said, this is something that I've dealt with and that's actually, I know that so many of my audience members and the readers for Wall Street Journal have unfortunately dealt with this as well and it's something that I address in my book if you wanna learn more about that, right? She never made it about her. All she did was say like, I understand your experience because I've also experienced it. If you wanna read more of my take around that, it's in my book, go purchase it. That's all. Emma did option three, like I said. The condition for being able to do option three though is that your audience already knows what you stand for. If you don't have a documented public stance on the things that your audience cares about, you can't show up cleanly when the moment hits, okay? You'll either look opportunistic or you'll stay quiet and both of those things will cost you. So do the work in advance, right? Document your public stance on things on the issues that your audience actually cares about. I talked to you guys all the time about polarizing content. So that should be a consistent part of your marketing strategy so that you are attracting in the people who are aligned with your values and you're deterring and turning off people who are not, okay? Take the position before the moment forces you to. That way, when the moment actually hits, you don't have to scramble. You already know who you are and what to say, right? So let's just be real here. I kind of know what happens at the stage of the episode. You start nodding, you start agreeing, and then you kind of go quiet and then you go back to your team meeting on Tuesday tomorrow and you don't change a damn thing. So what I want you to understand is that there's proof of this principle in real time. This is not theory, this is not a framework. What is actually unfolding right now in front of all of us, the Wall Street Journal headline ran, the audience they were trying to retain noticed, not in a small way, any flood, okay? I had male robins and people like that commenting on this post. That is who this is reaching, okay? So like this is not just like these tiny little business owners. These are big operators who are noticing this and they have real power to sway people to or away from a publication, okay? So female executives, founders, brand operators, the exact reader that Wall Street Journal depends on for ad revenue and subscriptions, took to LinkedIn, took to Instagram, took to TikTok, took to everywhere in waves to call it out. Fuck, I'm even talking about it on my podcast, okay? It was public, it was documented, and now it is permanent, you guys. The brand damage isn't like I said, going to be measurable in next month's report, but it's going to be measurable in the slow erosion of trust with that reader segment over the next 12 to 14 months. They didn't cross a small audience, you guys. They crossed the audience whose attention is the hardest to win back once it's gone. That is the alienating outcome in real time. Public values failure convert to a long arc brand decay. Emma did the inverse, right? She had a platform, she had a book. She had an audience already fired up about Wall Street Journal and what they did. So like I said, she stepped into the moment with conviction. She did, she didn't manufacture a feud. She spoke from a place of alignment with her audience's values, and she used that attention to point her audience towards her actual work. And she converted that moment into book sales, and into deeper loyalty. Same exact moment, very, very completely polar opposite outcomes, okay? Wall Street Journal took attention in lost trust, Emma took attention and converted it into revenue. That principle is sitting in front of all of us with names attached, with brands attached, in the actual week for recording this episode. The brands that know where the values line is, leverage attention moments. The brands that don't lose trust in them, and there really is no in between, okay? So if you want like a case study that this works, this is your fucking case study, you guys. It's playing out literally right now, or it just did, depending on when you're listening to this. So watch it carefully, and then go look at your own marketing from the last 90 days and ask yourself what side of the line that you've been on, okay? Because when you do that, and when you know how to really determine what's polarizing and what's alienation, you stop being the brand people are like quietly unfollowing in their head, and you start being the brand that people defend in the comments section, in their group chats everywhere. That is the actual shift, and that's what can happen for you in the next 90 days if you know how to make that happen. So hopefully, if you've been listening to this episode, you've been realizing that either number one, you've been staying silent for too long, and that you have not created any polarizing content that makes sure that your audience is aware of who you are, your brand and what you believe in and stand for, okay? Or you're realizing that maybe some of your polarizing content that you've intended as polarizing has actually alienated portions of your audience, and that's why it's been so difficult for you to create the sales you're looking for, okay? The reality I need you to remember is that when you make this shift, it doesn't take a year to see changes. It takes a system, it takes that values, and that experiences map that we were talking about, it takes that filter, it takes the discipline to polarize the substance and protect the values every single time, no exceptions, okay? And if you watched what Wall Street Journal did last month and you felt something, I want you to listen to that. That was your audience instinct firing correctly, okay? That same instinct is the one that you need to be installing into your team's marketing review before your brand makes the smaller stage version of the exact same mistake. So hopefully this episode was helpful for you guys. I hope that you are really enjoying me breaking down brands and like the marketing mistakes and the marketing wins that they have. If you guys have any questions about how to do this for your own brand, feel free to DM me over on Instagram. If you want me to look at your marketing and make sure you're not making this same mistake DM me on Instagram. And if you have any other brands where you're like, Savannah, I need you to break down what they did wrong, what they did right, message me on Instagram, I'll turn it into a podcast episode and I hope you guys enjoyed listening. I'll talk to you in the next one. Bye.