What’s your first thought when you get a negative review?
Sad? Disappointed? Excited to improve?
Sometimes a negative review can be the most compelling message your marketing could ever send. Here’s why.
How can negative reviews benefit your brand?
While it’s important to know who your product is for, it’s just as important to know who your product is not for.
Negative reviews can help you clarify your positioning—for both yourself and your customers.
Here are two great examples:
Liquid Death.
This brand is well known for how they use negative reviews. As they like to say, Liquid Death is “proudly not for everyone.”
So they happily use bad reviews and critical social media comments to show who they are not for.
The Economist.
They often pull quotes from negative reviews, then credit them to ignorant people as a way to show that their publication is for intelligent readers… like the Management Trainee, Aged 42, who said, “I never read The Economist.”
The Crew’s take
That reminds us of a negative review we got from someone who recently unsubscribed.
Their reason for hopping off our list? “The content is great but is creating FOMO in me.”
