What Good is Being Memorable for the Wrong Reasons?

If your word of mouth marketing plan is to put street canvassers at busy intersections to interrupt passerbys, verbally spam them with annoying questions about the cause and hand out pamphlets people are going to throw away ten seconds later, you missed.

Mindshare is a neutral entity.

Like tofu, it takes on the
flavor of whatever sauce it’s immersed in.

And yet, organizations spend
thousands of hours and millions of dollars generating word of mouth about their
brand, when what they should be deciding is what
kind of words they want coming out of people’s mouths.

Because when most customers
think of brands, all they think of is how crappy they are.

What good is being memorable
for the wrong reasons?