You've heard the advice: Avoid getting negative reviews on your product or company at all costs. Sometimes, that leads to shady practices like bribing or suing web sites that publish them.

But are negative reviews ALWAYS detrimental?

When Bad Reviews Are Good

A new study has found how social distance between a brand and consumer can change the effect of a bad review.

I spoke with the study authors. Here's a portion of our conversation:

Dr. Nailya Ordabayeva: Conventional wisdom would say that negative reviews are always bad. Interestingly, this wisdom has been based on past research that did not consider the identity of the brand and the meaning of the brand for consumers in the implications of these negative reviews.

What we found was that these deep connections that consumers have with their brands can actually protect brands from negative feedback that these brands receive from different other customers that consumers might wish to push away…

Tod: Your research found that if someone connects their identity to a brand, the negative reviews don't matter as much. But could they be beneficial somehow?

Dr. Nailya Ordabayeva: More specifically, what we found was that when consumers encounter these negative reviews of these brands to which they feel deeply connected, they start to scrutinize who [the reviewer is], in order to look for reasons to potentially discount the the review and their purchase decisions.

So when they find that the review comes from somebody who is very different from them — demographic characteristics and purchasing patterns, etc — they actually use that as an excuse to discount that review as being less informative and legitimate. As a result, they stick to the brand, they protect the brand, and in some situations they even are more willing to buy that brand.

Learn More

Their full conversation was about a half-hour long, and also covered things like:

• How marketers can increase that feeling of identity connection
• What putting small reviewer profiles on product pages does for conversion rates
• If the opposite is true — in other words, are POSITIVE reviews discarded by brand-connected consumers?
• And much more.

That full interview is on our podcast's Premium Feed.