Most companies want to be loved: they want passionate customers, enthusiastic vendors, devoted partners, and loyal employees. Yet, very few companies actually are loved. Most companies are tolerated at best, and at worst, ignored.

Why? Most companies are too forgettable to be loved. They’re too vanilla, too dough-boy, too milquetoast, too watered-down (or any other kitchen metaphor you prefer).

If you want your company to have passionately devoted customers, partners, and employees, then you need to inspire strong emotions. Once you inspire strong emotions, you can convince people to love your brand—and, eventually you’ll also get a few haters, critics, and naysayers.

Let me say something that might be rather shocking: it’s okay to have a few people hate your brand. It’s necessarily, even. If you’re not eliciting a negative response from someone, then you’re probably not very compelling to anyone.

Avid fans may be a small slice of your overall base, but they’ll do much your marketing work for you. They’ll post content online, sure, but they’ll also buy your products, buy your stock, talk about you with their peers, and work harder to spread your brand message.

If your company wants to develop a stronger emotional bond with others—if you’re interested new business, higher sales, and better talent—then the goal is not to avoid controversy and passion, but to avoid creating legions of people who simply don’t care.

In yesterday’s session “Developing Your Brand for Online and Mobile Audiences,” the panel briefly touched on how the importance of online content, especially content posted by consumers themselves. Posting content is a good measure of energy around a brand, because it takes effort; this content can take many forms: commentary, praise, video, tweets, or random blog chatter. But in any case, consumer-generated content is a hallmark of high participation with a brand.

When describing a minor detail about online content, the panelists actually made a very eloquently point, something far more significant than uploading videos or commenting on a Facebook fan page. And this is the matter of lovers, haters, and those in the middle:

“The people who will contribute content either love you or hate you. The people in the middle don’t care.”

The point was simple: most consumers aren’t willing to go out of their way to talk about a company unless they’re fired up about something. They have to be really excited, or, really angry.

But there’s a bigger message here, and it’s not about social media. The message is this: The people in the middle don’t care.

People in the middle don’t care about posting your content online. But more to the point, the people in the middle don’t care about buying your product (unless it’s the cheapest or most convenient option, which is a terrible spot to be in right now, because it’s a brand position by default, one that only succeeds until your competitors offers something even cheaper or more convenient).

And it’s not just consumers in the middle who don’t care. This principle applies to all your other audiences. Clients in the middle don’t really care about partnering with your company. Stockholders in the middle don’t care about sticking with you in a downturn. Employees in the middle don’t care about loyalty when a more lucrative offer comes along.

In my book, FASCINATE, I outline six “Gold Hallmarks” of a persuasive brand— six ways to determine whether or not a brand persuades behavior. Atop this list sit two criteria:

1. Provokes strong and immediate emotional reactions.

2. Creates advocates.

If your company wants to influence purchase decisions, you must provoke a strong and immediate emotional reactions, ones that create advocates. That is how to passionately expand your message.

Today, in a competitive environment, the middle position is death. Not caring is not buying. Not caring is goodbye. There are too many options on the shelves, too many ways to shut out your advertising message, too many competitors who are more than happy to take your best clients and distributors and salespeople away if “don’t care” is the best you can do.

Once people stop being in the middle, once they stop not caring, that’s when good things like sales and retention and leadership happen.

Today, marketing isn’t about damage control for the haters— it’s about provoking people in the middle to start to care.