Today in Digital Marketing

The Upside Of “Negative Social Distance” in Online Reviews

Apr 23, 2022 | Expert Interviews

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Today in Digital Marketing

We'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 websites that publish them, but are negative reviews always detrimental?

Nailya Ordabayeva and Lisa Cavanaugh set out to discover how the social distance between a brand and consumer can change the effect of a bad review. They published their findings in a paper called The Upside Of Negative Social Distance in Online Reviews Of Identity-Relevant Brands. They're both associate professors of marketing. Nailya at Boston College and Lisa, just over the pond from me at the University of British Columbia.

Our podcast host, Tod Maffin, recently spoke with them both.

Table of Contents

What Is An “Identity-Relevant” Brand?

Tod: Your work focused on identity-relevant brands. What do you mean by that? What are some examples of those types of brands?

Nailya: Yes. Identity-relevant brands are brands with which consumers have really strong emotional connections. You often hear about brands that generate a lot of commitment and a lot of love from consumers. Some examples could be Apple. It's a highly admired, deeply loved brand by consumers where consumers cannot wait to buy a new product whenever there's something new that comes up by the brand.

Identity-relevant brands are these brands that consumers have deep personal, emotional connections with and to which they feel deeply personally connected to some extent because consumers see some component of the self in these brands. They like to see some positive personal characteristics in these brands, such as “I use Apple because I'm creative because I'm cutting edge because I'm innovative because I'm unique.”

Other examples, can be found across many different categories including apparel, such as Nike, for example, even food. Across a pond from you in Canada, we found that President's Choice is a deeply identity-relevant brand for Canadian consumers. You can find these brands across many categories, and they're ubiquitous and they have really strong emotional connections with their customers.

The Surprising Lack of Research in the Space

Tod: I saw in your paper one of the brands that you studied was Tim Hortons in Canada. I could go on for hours about Tim Hortons and the quality of their brand in food, but we're not here to talk about that. [chuckles] There's not a lot of research, is there, that splits out reviews by how close someone's identity is to a review that they're reading? Did that surprise you?

Nailya: It did because the conventional wisdom would say that negative reviews are always bad. Interestingly, this wisdom has been based on past search that did not consider the identity of the brand and the meaning of the brand for consumers, and 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 sometimes, not always, but sometimes.

How Bad Reviews Can Help Your Brand

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

Nailya: Yes. 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 review is coming from, in order to look for reasons to potentially discount the review and their purchase decisions. When they find that the review comes from somebody who is very different from them in demographic characteristics and their purchasing patterns, et cetera, et cetera, they actually use that as an excuse to discount that review as being less informative, illegitimate.

As a result of that, they stick to the brand, they protect the brand, and in some situations, they even are more willing to buy that brand, with positive implications of these negative reviews for brand outcomes. Perhaps I can throw it to Lisa, for some additional insight about these various conditions that we found.

Lisa: Certainly. Tod, it's really interesting because I think this piece of identity relevant is so important because we're not just talking about any brand. There's a lot of brands that people like that they trust, that they use frequently, but that doesn't necessarily make them identity relevant. We're really talking about the special class of brands.

You mentioned Tim Hortons and anyone who lives in Canada or near Canada knows the Tim Hortons brand, it is truly identity relevant. Everything from the maple leaf appearing in the logo, oftentimes on the store or in terms of the actual cup or the hockey elements that are woven into promotions, it's really about identity. I think that's a really crucial part of our findings that Nailya has been describing is that this isn't just any brand. This is to identity-relevant brands, and that's the class for which the effects that we've described, this upside of negative review applies.

People Protect Themselves When They Stick Up for a Brand

Tod: I wonder how much it is where the reason that people want to protect the brand when they see a negative review if they're personally aligned to it is because in a way, do they feel like they're protecting their own identity?

Nailya: That's exactly right.

Lisa: Absolutely. Yes. You've got it, you've nailed it on the head. It's very much about the sense of self, being woven together with that brand, that that brand is a part of you just as your child or your fur person, your cat or dog, who's a part of your being, really a part of your essence and your identity. Just like you would protect those little people, or those cats and dogs, or those parents, you want to protect that brand similarly because they are a part of you.

Tod: Just a side note about cats and dogs. We recently interviewed an author of a paper who discovered that the cuter a logo you have, the more you are protected against negative things befalling your brand. The babies and puppies on social media apparently is now scientifically-proven.

Lisa: It's the same reason why politicians with baby faces have often been trusted more or given the benefit of the doubt if they've done something wrong. It's, yes, we're susceptible to these influences.

How the Researchers Tested This

Tod: How did you test all this?

Nailya: Oh, we had a range of studies. We analyzed data that we obtained from online traffic, actual online reviews of identity-relevant restaurant brands in big cities. We found that, yes, when these reviews are negative and they come from people who are distant from consumers, who are, for example, non-local customers who don't really know much about the local culture surrounding the restaurant, these reviews are found to be less useful and they're actually heeded less than reviews that come from more similar, more relevant consumers.

We also ran a bunch of controlled experiments where we actually were able to isolate to the extent that we could– The meaning of the brand for customers as well as how people perceived the socially distant versus socially close reviewer, and we found that indeed, only when the brand is personally identity relevant, the negative comment from a person who is dissimilar to the customer get discounted. In some situations, it even motivates customers to love the brand more and purchase it more.

We had some studies that featured products like Tim Hortons, for example, in the food industry, going off this restaurant, online data that we found. We also had some studies with apparel brands like the NFL Shield Apparel, for instance, as well as Apple, that we've mentioned previously. Across all of these contexts, when a negative review came from somebody who was deemed to be dissimilar, distant from us on some characteristics, then it was completely discounted.

In some cases, even it motivated these positive effects and generated some positive effects, in some cases, even compared to positive feedback. In some cases, brands were better off getting negative [chuckles] comments, negative reviews, over positive reviews because it really deeply committed customers to commit even more and fight hard for their brands even more.

How Should a Marketer Change What They're Doing

Tod: I'm thinking about the person who is listening to this, and let's say that they are a marketing manager for a mid-level e-commerce brand or restaurant or something. How should that person change what they do, or how should the company change, in order to strengthen that brand identity connection with their consumers? Are there things that they can do to juice it?

Lisa: Sure. I think the first stage-gate, Tod, is to say, “Okay, are we a brand that could be identity relevant?” If that's not a possibility, we don't have as much to say to those folks. If they do have the potential to be identity relevant, they can connect on all different types of characteristics and qualities.

We think about what are our aspects of identity? How are different aspects of self that a brand could tap into? How can we then better align with our consumers on this front? If that is the case, not only playing up those elements but also building stronger relationships with those consumers, who may find their identity relevance with your brand. That's a big part of Nailya and my findings is that really for the people who have the strongest relationship with the brand, those are the ones who will rally behind the brand, show a strong allegiance towards the brand, and show this upside of negative in terms of this positive response to negative reviews of the identity-relevant brand.

Put Profiles of Your Reviewers On Your Site

Tod: One of the things you recommended in your paper was to put a small profile of the reviewer alongside their review. Why?

Lisa: Yes, because oftentimes the cues that we see about identity, online in person, we take all kinds of automatic assessments of whether a person is like us, similar to us, or dissimilar to us, but online, we have a scarcity of information except for the information that's available in a review. What Nailya and I had found previously, just looking across, whether it's Yelp or Nordstrom or Lululemon, increasingly you're finding brands including more information about the person writing the review, so that sourced information.

Who that person is? What is their age? What is their build, sometimes their hair color or eye color, if it's Sephora or Nordstrom for makeup products? We can then start to say, “Is this person like me or not like me? Where do they live? The Yelp reviews, are they from the Nanaimo? Are they from Vancouver or are they from Houston, Texas?” We have a sense automatically, of how similar or dissimilar that person is to you. We use the term social distance to talk about this is how socially close or socially distant is that person from you.

Tod: I've always wanted to see in a little profile of the reviewer, the distribution of the star ratings for them. How many 1-star reviews have they given versus 5-star reviews? As a consumer, if all they're doing is giving [chuckles] negative reviews, I would probably discount a lot of what they had to say. What do you think about having a little summary of their past star review history?

Lisa: That's a great intuition and Nailya will tell you. We had that same intuition, we built that into some of our experiments. I'll let her tell you about that.

Nailya: Thank you for hitting the nail on the head. That's exactly right. We found that one piece of really useful information for consumers reading these reviews is, what's the review history of this reviewer? Are they consistently negative, consistently positive, this and that? A little bit of this, a little bit of that. What we found was that negative reviews are particularly discounted and rebuked. They're particularly potent in generating positive outcomes for brands when these reviews come from consistently negative reviewers.

If somebody has just a 1-star across their history, people will tend to use that as a stronger reason to discount that feedback even more. When the brand means something personally or identity-relevant to consumers, and they see this negative feedback from a distant other, who also is extremely negative throughout their history, that's all the more reason to rally behind the brand and to show support. That's a situation where negative reviews, actually yield significant upsides over having even no reviews, for instance.

Can Displaying a Profile Backfire?

Tod: Are there any instances where putting a review history or a reviewer's profile on a website might backfire on the brand?

Nailya: If the brand is not identity relevant, then it can. What we find is that when the brand is identity relevant, putting that reviewer information online, either has no effect compared to not putting that information or yields positives if this reviewer happens to be distant and different from the consumer. Whereas, if the brand is not identity relevant, people actually do [chuckles] more objectively and more rationally weigh that reviewer information.

If they do see a negative feedback about an identity irrelevant brand with which they don't have a personal connection, then negative reviews from close reviewers tend to actually yield more negative implications for brands. A little less so than distant reviews, but nevertheless, it can be a little bit more costly.

This is why knowing whether your brand is identity relevant and the extent to which consumers are willing to rally behind your brand, and finding ways to build that connection is so important. It can really boost your defenses against this negative feedback and it can also generate situations where you don't necessarily lose much by providing more information about these reviewers on the online platform.

Are Positive Reviews Discarded by Identity-Aligned People?

Tod: Your paper focused on negative reviews. I wonder if the opposite is true. Are positive reviews discarded in the minds of people who are identity aligned with a brand?

Lisa: No, that's the thing that was so interesting to us about this. When we think about identity-relevant brands specifically and positive reviews, it's because that brand is seen as a part of the self, just like we all like to receive compliments or people will say positive things about us, it doesn't seem to matter who is saying the positive things about the brand. People don't tend to scrutinize the source of that review. Whether that person's close or distant, they're happy to have that positive information about the brand because that's an affirmation of the brand and an affirmation of the self.

If those negative reviews that potentially pose a threat to the self, that then become the ones that people stand up, listen and then try to counter-argue or respond to by providing more support for that brand.

What Surprised the Researchers?

Tod: What surprised you both the most about your findings?

Nailya: I guess finding situations where negative can actually be positive, [chuckles] was quite surprising because it just goes against such a strong narrative in the industry and popular media, that negative reviews are really detrimental and really fatal for brands in many situations. Finding that negative can actually yield positive outcomes for brands was quite surprising.

Also, finding that that actually holds across different categories and different types of products. We found it for food, we found it for apparel, and some other examples that we just discussed, finding that it's such a prevalent phenomenon as long as your brand has this deep personal connection with the consumer, that was quite eye-opening to myself, perhaps. Lisa had some additional [chuckles] surprising outcomes.

Lisa: Everything that Nailya said is absolutely correct, that we were so excited and surprised, but at the same time, how robust the effect and consistent the effect was sometimes in science. We're finding things that are very fleeting. We have the studies that were published in the paper as well as a bunch of others that showed the same effect that didn't end up in the paper. Just how strong of an effect this was, was I think, both exciting, but also showed that there had been a hole in our literature and marketing about what we believed to be true, and what best practices were being shared with marketers in general, or in textbooks that we said, “Hey, here's something really important that has been neglected, that we want to shine a light on and we want marketers to know about. We think it's really important for our academic research to have impact for practitioners who are actually trying to do this work on a day to day basis, and managing their brands and managing negative reviews.”

Early on in our work, we had come across a lot of popular press articles saying how much money was being spent and how much time and resources were being invested by brands to counteract negative reviews, either to get rid of them, to purge them, to try to hide them, to clean them up because there were typos in them. What we realized is sometimes, doing nothing, not spending the time, not trying to change the status quo, was actually in the brand's best interest.

That was really I think, exciting and surprising that brands were wasting money. Based on what we have found, brands have wasted time and money by doing something that's actually not in their best interest. That was, I think, pretty surprising and exciting for us.

When Brands Try to Edit Reviews (!)

Tod: Did you say that some brands were trying to correct the typos in the reviews?

Lisa: Yes. Zappos actually did that years ago.

Tod: What? How do you even edit a consumer review? Would they go into the actual review itself and try to tweak it?

Lisa: They would. They would basically do a spell check, just like you would in a Word document, but they would essentially spell check and correct typos and grammar because they thought that was undermining the perceived legitimacy of the reviews that were being posted on their site, and therefore potentially hurting the brands or the shoes or clothing that they were selling online. Nailya, I'll let you go first.

Nailya: Well, as market academics, we're very intrigued by the power of brand. Realizing that there hasn't been so much literature or studies on the role of brand, and brand meaning in this huge phenomenon of negative online reviews, was a big draw for both of us as marketing academics in order to really draw some interesting new conclusions for real-world brands, many of which do have really strong histories and strong connections with consumers.

If you were to look at a number of studies, a lot of the studies that were conducted in this space in the past, a lot of them would actually use hypothetical brands, something like XYZ restaurant or ABC tour or they would not mention the brand in the context of a study. Of course, this was necessary for various theoretical academic methodological reasons in order to control the various differences that might exist across real-world brands.

What was exciting to us or puzzling to us was the fact that in the real world, consumers do read reviews about brands. Actually, they have a lot of information about and they have personal histories with, and so we really wanted to understand how this personal history, this personal connection that is out there for many brands across many categories, impacts this phenomenon of negative reviews.

Lisa: I'm a lover of brands. I am a strong believer in strong relationships both with people but also with brands. There are brands certainly like Nailya was mentioning, that I feel a strong affinity towards, I love them. I have a deep embodying connection to them. Part of that just comes from that interest in what makes us form these relationships with these non-sentient beings. This isn't a sentient being, this is a brand but yet it feels like a person, and we can have deep relationships with them.

The other pieces that, we have also outside of our academic circles, a lot of friends who are managers, who are working day-to-day trying to figure out what's best for their company and what's best for their product and brand outcomes. Helping them solve a problem that they're dealing with and grappling with, and maybe chasing up the wrong tree, that was really exciting to us, to be able to help them solve a problem that they face, with meaningful answers that would cost less time and moneywise than what they're doing currently. That was a big piece.

I'm from the United States originally, but working and living in Canada now, just seeing how much of the Canadian identity is really imbued into so many brands in Canada. It's very apparent to someone, You come with a freshness of perspective that you don't necessarily see, or you see the contrast between countries.

Nailya and I both have had the pleasure of traveling pretty broadly prior to the pandemic and living in multiple places, and you see the differences from region to region and how that sense of identity gets imbued into brands. That's another part that really was very motivating for us with this project.

Canada and the U.S. Are Different Countries

Tod: I'm also fascinated by the difference across borders. Even just between the US and Canada, there are some pretty distinct messaging differences that I have to say almost without exception, it's the Americans that screw up when they try to come to Canada. [chuckles] The failure of Target in Canada, I think, is a great example of that.

My favorite example– And I can't remember the car manufacturer's name. I think it was Chevrolet, but there was a campaign that they used to run in the US. It was very successful and the tagline was The Heartbeat of America. It would show great vistas and cowboys. They looked like Marlborough ads from back in the day, but they had “The Heartbeat of America.” They brought that campaign to Canada and they just changed the wording of it.

The wording became “The Heartbeat of Canada.”

Nobody in Canada understood what they meant by that. They actually had to change the campaign [chuckles] because just simply changing the name of the country– Canadian, I don't know whether it's– We don't have the same level of patriotic ethos as the US, or whether it's expressed differently in this country, but that's always my favorite example of that subtle difference between countries. It comes across here, the Heartbeat of Canada, and Canadians were just like, “What are you trying to say here?” [chuckles]

What Marketers Should Change First

Bottom line, how should marketers and brand managers change what they're doing in the light of your findings?

Nailya: A couple of things. First of all, diagnose how identity relevant your brand is to the general public, as well as to different segments. Perhaps you have certain segments of diehard fans, who have the strongest relationship with your brand. Understand what your brand means to the public as well as different segments so that you can devise your online review strategies and platforms accordingly, based on this identity relevance of the brand, to that audience.

Second, provide more information about reviewers. Post some information about their demographic, their purchase histories, their socioeconomic characteristics. Whatever serves as a signal can serve as a signal to consumers about how similar or different they are from the authors of the various negative reviews that they might be reading. In addition to that, if you're able to somehow build some sense of uniqueness into customer's perception of self in the context of the brand community, that can actually also foster this idea that “No matter who this reviewer is, I am going to be different from them because my relationship with this brand is different.” That can actually inoculate brands from negative reviews of a broader set of authors. Lisa?

Lisa: I think even to build on that further, that there's that sense of identity, there's different aspects of identity. There's myself in terms of my age, gender, and geographic location or occupation. There's also that sense of what community I'm a part of? When we think about brand communities and how brands can create strong relationships, not just between the brand and the individual consumer, but among consumers as well. That strength of brand relationship that can create that sense of collective identity and unity, is also really important to creating that strong brand relationship.

Tod: Well, certainly interesting research, and I'm delighted that you could share it with us. Nailya Ordabayeva and Lisa Cavanaugh are associate professors of marketing at Boston College and the University of British Columbia, respectively. Thank you both for your time.

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