Customers feel good / hate about your products or services is better than no feeling?

I was watching a slide from a very successful entrepreneurial, in which his argument about users feel about products totally surprised me. Here is his idea:

How users feel about your products and services? There are three zones: Love, mediocrity and hate.
The thing that puzzled me is he believes it is better if your products or services are at the love and hate zones, while you are screwed in the mediocrity zone.

I thought it would be best in love zone, than in mediocrity, the worst part is hate, not mediocrity.

Since the guy gave the presentation is very successful I do not think he would make such obvious mistake. But his argument really beyond my comprehension.

Please help me out here.

"Les extrèmes se touchent"

My guess is that if you manage to engage people in one way or the other your idea will spread.

Now think about how hate/fear more easily spread than love. It is something about hate (and I think ultimately fear) that makes people want to be confirmed in that their world-view is the "correct" one.

Also I think it is far more easy to convert a hater to be a lover than a mediocre to be a lover. For an analogy think about an ex-partner. It is a fine line between love and hate there. Why not in other areas? The feelings are the same.

I think the point he was trying to make is "don't care" is the worst feeling about your brand or product. Apart from anything else, you're going to get no blog posts or buzz on the strength of that.

If you're not afraid to pick sides, then you'll win some, you'll lose some... but In each case you'll probably get passionate posts about how good or awful your service is compared to x, and very probably a link in both cases, or a link to the post you made they're taking issue with.

Think about IE vs Firefox ... "I hate FF because,...." "I love FF because" If I see the opposing view enough times, even if I've mostly seen hate *I am very probably going to check your product out, download it and make my own mind up.

Whichever way it balances out, you get more users!

color.com is getting a lot of buzz from jealousy and misunderstanding... on top of the 41 million smackers.

That's not exactly hate but it isn't mediocrity either now is it?

They key is the love and hate. It means that your product evokes some kind of emotion. In between just means that no one care about your product at all, which really is the worst thing that can happen.

If there's only hate, obviously there's a problem but unless you're truly clueless and incompetent you aren't going to create something that everyone hates. There's going to be some segment that loves it.

A few months ago I saw some friends posting on facebook about a site that aggregates data from other sites in a way they felt violated their privacy and urged people to go to that site and remove themselves. It was one of those "pass it on" type messages. The people passing the message obviously hated it, but the funny thing is, I bet that hate translated into free advertising. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the company started the first "hate" post themselves.

That's one thing to recognize, that people who hate your product may know people who love it. The key is buzz, getting people to talk about it. You want people who care about your product. Obviously it'd be best if they cared about it in a good way, but unless your product is truly awful, even hate is better being unknown.