Not Thriving: Reverse Psycho

Three wicks. And from the page, a hell of a lot more examples than that.

Crosswicking can help, but I think part of the problem is the name. It has absolutely no indication what this is about. I thought it had something to do with the movie Psycho, but it's actually about marketers using reverse psychology to move products.

Maybe as simple a change as Dont Buy Our Product? Or is that too close to Our Product Sucks?

Wow, yeah, really bad name.

The lack of wicks ... well, crosswicking doesn't require a TRS thread, but a lot of the examples don't have anywhere to be crosswicked to, since we don't have many pages for products or advertising campaigns.

To be honest, I can't really tell the difference between those two...

Our Product Sucks has examples from Reverse Psycho, and then there's Reverse Psychology Marketing. All three are a little too similar for my taste.

edited 29th Apr '14 4:44:39 AM by crazysamaritan

I thought it was about some kind of inversion to a psychopath.

What's the difference between this, and just an ad page for Reverse Psychology?

There's also Reverse Psychology Marketing, which seems to be a little bit more meta. Or rather actually tricking people, rather than obviously pretending to trick them.

A few of the examples are specifically Our Product Sucks, like the second one. "Earthbound. It stinks."

^^ Indeed. Reverse Psychology Marketing is basically complaining. Reverse Psycho has a completely unintuitive and misleading name (Like Duck, I thought, from the name alone, that it was some sort of Reverse psychopath, something like the old joke about the Boy Scout all but dragging a little old lady across the street as his "good deed" only for her to point out that she was waiting for the bus —that is now stopping on the other side of the street.) Our Product Sucks is the best of the three; the most clearly defined ("an ad or ad campaign where the makers of the product openly and clearly denigrate their own product." and the only one that can be clearly separated out.

So, I'd suggest that we leave Our Product Sucks alone, as it's currently defined: an ad or ad campaign that openly and clearly points out what's wrong with the product.

Find a new name for Reverse Psycho, and clarify the definition: An ad or ad campaign that tells the audience "don't buy this" or "you don't want this product." Then clean the examples. The Lonely Maytag Repairman, for instance, isn't an example. The ads didn't say or imply "don't buy Maytag appliances" or "you don't want a Maytag appliance" in any way.

I don't entirely know what to suggest for Reverse Psychology Marketing. The name is bad, since Reverse Psychology is "make someone want or want to do something by telling them they can't have it or shouldn't do it." Which includes both Our Product Sucks and Reverse Psycho as they currently stand. Since it seems to be "ads or an ad campaign that jerks the desired market around by getting their hopes up, then letting them down, then saying "Aha, gotcha! and giving them something good" " maybe something like Sadistic Marketing would work....

edited 29th Apr '14 5:42:15 AM by Madrugada

Why not simply expand given subsections of Reverse Psychology Marketing? Or was that simply the previous situation, already, and the page got too large for someone's tastes?

From the second post on the discussion page, it appears that Reverse Psychology Marketing was launched without any YKTTW back in 2010, by Sackett, because he saw an example and "thought it would make a good trope". And it's languished ever since, with 7 wicks and only 48 inbounds in the last 2 years.

It works as a supertrope: selling a product through Reverse Psychology, with the current subtropes Our Product Sucks (ads tell you why the product is bad) and Reverse Psycho (ads that tell you you shouldn't buy it for some reason other than the product is bad (It's not for your demographic, like Yorkies; buying it means that someone else will be hurt, like the Serta Sheep; or it's too expensive, fast, powerful, whatever, like Comcast's "Slowskys" campaign).

Why not fold them back together? Because there are two different dynamics ( "eh, it's not that great, but if you want it anyway, knowing that..." versus "This isn't for you.") at work in Our Product Sucks and Reverse Psycho. Putting them both into one trope will increase confusion on other pages; someone reading an trope example on a works page will have figure out which of the variations the example is. That's why we have the supertrope/subtrope distinction in the first place.

edited 2nd May '14 5:56:20 AM by Madrugada

So basically:

• Reverse Psychology Marketing: Overall supertrope about marketing strategies not (seemingly) encouraging people to buy or use their products.
  • Our Product Sucks: You probably don't want to buy it because it's not good, but we're selling it anyway.
  • Reverse Psycho: This is for people who're not you. Don't buy it.

Would No Such Thing as Bad Publicity fit somewhere? It's mentioned as a contrast to Reverse Psychology Marketing, but I'm not quite sure it's not just an intended goal of some of the strategies.

edited 2nd May '14 9:10:19 AM by AnotherDuck

I'd say Reverse Psycho is "Here's a (supposedly good) reason you shouldn't buy our product." "It's not for you" is only one of the ways it can be done. But otherwise, good summation and good Laconics, too.

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity is related, but I don't think it's a subtrope, since the "bad" publicity isn't usually intentionally sought or welcomed by the producer; they simply figure out how to take advantage of it.

edited 2nd May '14 9:22:25 AM by Madrugada

Reverse Psychology Marketing is a bad name and the description is not very well done. I would propose to re-run it through YKTTW if someone is willing to do so. Reverse Psycho certainly does need a name change; when I saw it I thought that it was abotu psychopaths.

I don't think Reverse Psychology Marketing is a bad name. But the definition definitely needs a lot of work. A run back through YKTTW would help, and might even identify other subtropes.

Reverse Psycho is a bad name.

So for Reverse Psycho, we need a new name. Do we need a crowner for that?

Does the description need some tweaking to more clearly differentiate it from Our Product Sucks?

As for it not thriving, I'm not sure it's as bad as it looks. Since it's an ad trope, it doesn't get a lot of wicks, because ads seldom get pages to wick to, and since they're specific to ads, they're not as popular as more universal tropes. It does still have a fair amount of examples, after all. A better name would certainly help, though.

Yeah, maybe I didn't word the bit about No Such Thing as Bad Publicity properly, but there are examples where companies try to get more publicity by making it so bad that people want to talk about it, so they are intentionally going for it. Not necessarily intentional, though. And the intentional part is probably more used to make blogs and stuff popular, rather than to sell products.

edited 2nd May '14 10:05:54 AM by AnotherDuck

I don't think we need a crowner just to decide whether we want to rename since no one is defending it.

And yeah, you guys are right about the wicks. It's not as bad as it seems, but jesus it needs a new name badly.

Yeah, the name needs to go, whatever else we decide to do with it.

So, any suggestions for names?

• Dont Buy Our Product as mentioned above.
• Anti Advertisement
• Reverse Advertisement
• Inverse Advertisement
• ...
• Profit.

Eh, I'm blank.

"Here's a reason not to buy our product: it sucks" So Our Product Sucks is a subtrope of Reverse Psycho? I'd still rather lump them all under Reverse Psychology Marketing, leaving Our Product Sucks as a redirect and cutting Reverse Psycho entirely.

Clock is set.

edited 4th Jun '14 6:52:10 AM by Willbyr

I'd go with that.

Re-clocking.

I also agree with the proposed suggestion in 17.

17 seems sound.

17 is good, considering that reverse psychology is " advocacy of a belief or behavior that is opposite to the one desired, with the expectation that this approach will encourage the subject of the persuasion to do what actually is desired: the opposite of what is suggested."

Sure.

That's six people in favour so far, do we need to create a crowner, or will there be enough posting support?