by: Hannah Miet

Twice in my content marketing career, editors have redlined parts of my copy, replacing “negative” words with positive framing. In both cases, the content, defanged, lost all of its power.

Worst of all, it no longer made sense.

The first incident occurred years ago, when I had been ghostwriting thought leadership for executives at a firm in commercial real estate (CRE), an industry that has been in a semi-recession since 2020. My headlines named the problem before pivoting to a silver lining for investors: “CRE is frozen in a debt crisis. Here is what investors are doing to push deals through anyway.”

The article was already live on owned channels when a new head of marketing joined the company. She told me after we were introduced to each other over email that she didn’t like its negative tone, especially in the headline. She wanted to reflect “optimism, right from the jump” with “a more solution-forward energy.” 

Later, I noticed she had changed the headline in the backend to “Where Top CRE Executives See Promise.”

In her opinion, the fix was to skip acknowledgment of the office debt crisis filling the pages of Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal and focus only on the expert-driven solution. The problem was that, without quick grounding in the debt crisis, the title and everything that followed did not easily make sense. What promise? Against what? The meaning was gone. 

More recently, a former marketing executive turned founder – who’d long been a sounding board for me, and I for him – sent back a sea of red on some copy I’d written for my content consultancy’s website. 

A line from my copy,

“…Either you don’t post much, and less talented people eclipse you online as the so-called thought leaders in your space,”

became, with several strokes of his proverbial pen,

“…Either you don’t post much, and a diverse range of voices contributes to the broader thought leadership ecosystem.”

When I asked him about the logic behind his suggestion, his reasoning was simple: He did not believe in “negative copy.”

The instinct to strip negativity out of content/copy comes from the fear that anything negative will rub off on the brand.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it doesn’t factor in how our brains work. And how our brains work is the foundation of all strategic marketing. 

Contrast = Comprehension 

Contrast – i.e., showing the problem vs. the solution, the good vs. the bad, or other opposites that inherently involve using “negative” words or framing – is what makes ideas comprehensible. Our brains can’t make sense of new information unless it has something to compare it against. 

Contrast is what makes ideas comprehensible. Our brains can’t make sense of new information unless it has something to compare it against.

In his Course in General Linguistics, published in 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, showed that words don’t have inherent meaning. They have meaning only in relation to what they aren’t. “Hot” only has meaning because “cold” exists. 

Strip out the opposite and you strip out the meaning. The reader has no anchor for why any of this matters. They have to do the cognitive work of figuring out the stakes themselves. Most won’t. They will just feel vaguely confused and click away.

Confusion is itself a negative emotion. Someone trying to protect the brand from negativity by stripping away certain language may very well make the reader feel a negative thing about the brand.

The negativity, in other words, did not disappear. It just moved from the page into the reader’s experience.

Problem-agitate-solution, the framework for copywriting that I also apply to expert-driven content, is actually an act of empathy. To know how to agitate a problem, you have to step into the reader’s shoes and feel their pain. You have to imagine what the consequences of that problem feel like for them. 

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” I agree, and would add, in content marketing, clarity requires contrast.

Negativity = Attention

Comprehension isn’t the only reason why negative framing works in content marketing. Decades of cognitive research on attention point in one direction – toward negativity.

Roy Baumeister and colleagues laid the groundwork in 2001 with “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” published in Review of General Psychology. Reviewing evidence across emotion, learning, memory, and social relationships, they showed that negative information consistently has greater psychological impact than equivalent positive information. Bad is more memorable than good. Once it lands in a reader’s brain, it stays.

Two decades before that, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s prospect theory established loss aversion: the pain of a loss is felt roughly twice as strongly as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. A 2020 replication by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health confirmed the finding across 19 countries and 13 languages, showing it as universal.

The implication for content: if you want your reader to act, what they stand to lose hits harder than what they stand to gain.

Negativity is often the difference between a piece that gets read and one that gets scrolled past. A 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed more than 100,000 headline variations and found that each additional negative word increased click-through rate by 2.3%. 

Negativity drives attention, comprehension, and memory. As long as it’s not used to fear-monger, it has an essential place in content marketing. 

An aside on the ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ tic

You’ve seen it all over your feed. I clocked these specific examples: 

• “Sales isn’t about closing. It’s about CRM hygiene.”

• “That’s not a career setback. It’s an opportunity for a strategic pivot.”

• “That’s not a point of view. That’s a participation trophy.”

If I’m out here defending negative framing, what about this construction, the one AI has flooded our feeds with?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this construct, in and of itself. It is contrast, which is exactly what I am defending. The problem is what AI does with it: uses it constantly, with no variation, and with false opposites that don’t actually illuminate anything.

A job board for writers with a large following recently posted advice on LinkedIn about how to get your first retainer as a ghostwriter. The post ended with: “The quiet six-figure writing career most working ghostwriters have isn’t on Twitter. It’s invoicing.”

Invoicing is not the opposite of Twitter. We all invoice. That is how we get paid for work we already have. How is that helpful to a ghostwriter looking for their first retainer, exactly?

The problem is that AI – and those who post content straight from AI – use this structure in the least artful way. When contrast is used to highlight real consequences and opposites, it makes the stakes clear. When it is used lazily, with false ones, it confuses the reader. 

In practice: Three moves for content marketers

1. When you interview an SME for content, try this question: “What is a commonly held belief or best practice in your industry that is actually wrong-minded?” Let them rant. Ask follow-ups inside the rant. What comes out is a problem-solution structure in their own words, with their own examples, with the negative framing already built in by the expert.
   
2. In headlines, name the problem. Show the stakes. Signal that a solution exists, but do not pre-resolve it. Each negative word in a headline increases click-through rate by 2.3%. You are leaving attention on the table when you sand down the stakes.
   
3. Stop treating problem-agitate-solution as solely a copywriting trick. It works in thought leadership, too. The post that names a problem and sits with its context earns the right to propose a solution. The piece that opens with hope and optimism grounded in…nothing… has not earned anything yet. ■
   

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Hannah Miet is the founder of HMC, a thought leadership consultancy that helps B2B experts and brands turn real expertise into content with a real point of view. She’s a New York Times–published writer named a 2024 Woman of Influence in Marketing and Communications by GlobeSt. You can find her on LinkedIn, where she has taken up permanent residence.