Wix’s Negative Advertising Campaign Falls Flat with WordPress Developers and Professionals

Wix has launched a negative advertising campaign targeting WordPress, following a marketing stunt where the company shipped out Bose headphones to influential WordPress community members. Recipients were puzzled, because it appeared the company was wasting its marketing budget on people who were not likely to be swayed by the campaign.

Subsequent advertisements in this new “You Deserve Better” campaign are markedly more negative than the launch video sent to recipients of the headphones, packed with tasteless and tired motifs.

When asked what message they are intending to send with the videos, Wix representative Maya Gril likened using WordPress to being stuck in a bad relationship.

“The campaign shows in a clever way that WordPress users don’t need to be stuck in a bad relationship with their platform and they should consider the alternative which allows them to focus on their actual work,” Gril said. “Each video in the campaign revolves around user pain points, which also highlight Wix’s strengths.”

“I guess they’re trying to provoke us into responding?” WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg tweeted in response to discussion on the campaign. “I agree it comes off as creepy and misleading to impersonate ‘WordPress’ this way.

WPTavern highlights one of the big drawback of Wix – data portability. When asked for his thoughts on the campaign, Mullenweg added that Wix is the only CMS in the world that doesn’t allow export – even Facebook does. The Wix support center states: Your Wix site and all of its content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere.