Negative Reviews Can Boost Sales Even More Than Positive Ones

By Amy Meeker

Dartmouth College’s Nailya Ordabayeva and two colleagues—Lisa Cavanaugh and Darren Dahl of the University of British Columbia—showed 300 NFL fans a description of a league-branded hoodie and either a one-star or a five-star review of it by a Cleveland Browns fan. The participants answered questions about their similarity to the reviewer and their interest in buying the garment. When people thought they and the reviewer were alike, their purchase intent was lower if they saw the one-star review rather than the five-star review. But when they felt unlike the reviewer, the one-star review generated significantly higher purchase intent than the five-star review. The conclusion: Negative reviews can boost sales even more than positive ones.

Professor Ordabayeva, defend your research.

Ordabayeva: When people identify strongly with a brand, as football fans do with the NFL, a negative review may seem like a threat to their own identity. This often happens when the review comes from a “socially distant” source: someone who is dissimilar to them in terms of geographic location, age, gender, sports team affiliation, and so on. In that instance people are apt to question the reviewer’s right to criticize the brand. They may consequently feel an urge to “protect” it by increasing their preference for it and their intent to buy it. It’s a visceral reaction to what feels like a personal attack.

HBR: Are our egos really that fragile?

As a rule, no. Only certain types of brands trigger this reaction—ones in which you see some facet of yourself. You might really like a particular dish soap or laundry detergent, but you wouldn’t see it as an important part of your identity. After all, everyone has to clean the kitchen and do laundry; those things are an inescapable part of everyday life. They’re not self-defining in the way that allegiance to a sports team can be.

You could have an identity-relevant brand in almost any product category, but they’re more common in some—for instance, local restaurants. Certain tech brands can be tied to your identity, too; many people see owning an Apple device as a badge of creativity and innovativeness. Harley-Davidson and Dunkin’ fit that mold as well.

Why would social similarity or distance be so important?

People differentiate between the sources of threats to their identities. Think about family relationships. If a relative of yours dislikes members of your family, you probably accept that he or she has the right to criticize them. It would be a different story if someone outside the family was critical, though. You’d be likely to dismiss that person’s comments, as the NFL fans who felt socially distant from the reviewer did.

How big a lift in purchase intent did the one-star review produce for those fans?

Among the fans who felt highly distant from the reviewer, those who saw the negative review were 20% more willing to buy the hoodie than those who saw the positive review.

In another experiment involving NFL hoodies, we confirmed that negative reviews have this effect only when brands are identity-relevant. This time we recruited participants from the general population. We asked 399 people—not all of whom were football fans—to read a brief introduction to the NFL and indicate the strength of their relationship to the league. They then read a description of the hoodie along with a five-star or a one-star review by a Dallas Cowboys fan and indicated their social distance from the reviewer along with their purchase intent. Among participants who had the strongest relationship to the league but felt highly distant from the reviewer, purchase intent was 27% greater for those who read the one-star review than for those who read the five-star review. Among participants who strongly identified with the league and felt only mildly distant from the reviewer, the lift from the one-star review was much smaller. And the purchase intent of participants who felt little kinship with the NFL was lower when they read the one-star review than when they read the five-star review, regardless of their degree of social distance.

Are there reviewer traits other than social similarity or distance that matter?

Review history is important. If consumers know that someone consistently posts negative comments, they have all the more reason to dismiss a review and double down on their support for a brand. We tested this in two experiments among Canadian consumers using reviews of President’s Choice coffee—a brand many Canadians strongly identify with. In the first experiment some participants saw a negative review of the coffee by either an American reviewer—that is, a socially distant one—or a Canadian one, along with two other negative reviews written by the same person. Other participants saw no reviews. The purchase intent of people who read the American’s review was 9% higher than that of those who read the Canadian’s and about 11% higher than that of people who didn’t read a review at all. In the second experiment, we indicated the reviewer’s consistent negativity in a different way, by stating that he or she historically awarded, on average, just 1.5 stars out of five. This time the purchase intent of people who read the American’s review was 11% higher than that of those who read the Canadian’s review and about 6% higher than that of those who saw no review.

Managers sometimes go to great lengths to suppress negative reviews. Are they wasting their time?

It depends on the relationship customers have with a brand—something that can be readily determined by looking at fan forums, brand followers, and so on. If the target population identifies strongly with the brand, it may be best to let negative reviews be. In that case managers should collect and display information about the reviewers that consumers can use to infer their social distance from them.

Managers can also measure social distance by searching their platforms and databases for areas where customer and reviewer characteristics diverge. That will reveal customer segments in which negative reviews are likely to produce benefits.

How can marketers make their brands more identity-relevant?

Sometimes it’s a matter of communication campaigns. Other times managers can incorporate some aspect of identity into the product itself. In Canada, for example, the outdoor lifestyle brand Roots puts a maple leaf on some of its products. In the States, Jeep has begun using the American flag on the badging of its cars.

Such products often appeal to consumers’ collective identities, or shared sense of belonging to a group, and can spark a protective response even when a negative review comes from a close reviewer—especially when it comes from a close reviewer. In our experiments, we found that when collective identity was evoked, negative comments from a distant reviewer had no effect—as if there were no review. But when participants saw a negative review from a close reviewer—someone who was part of the same group and should share the collective identity—they viewed that person as a dissident, even a traitor, whose comments represented a more existential threat. So they went to greater lengths to compensate and expressed a purchase intent that was 10% higher than that of consumers who saw no review. This tells us that if managers can find ways to emphasize collective identity, they can inoculate their brand against negative comments from distant reviewers and even see a surprising upside from negative comments written by close reviewers.