No, say Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester—professors of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and MIT's Sloan School of Management, respectively—writers of negative reviews tend to be the best customers of the business or service being criticized. By "best" they mean the most loyal and most valuable (customers who spend the most money).
Your most loyal customers are your most negative reviewers, they conclude, quoting a French maxim ("Your best friends are your hardest critics") to illustrate their point.
The duo's May 2013 paper, "Deceptive Reviews: The Influential Tail," examines more than 325,000 online reviews (both positive and negative) written by customers of a major apparel retailer that sells its wares via stores, catalogs and a website. (The company is not identified by name, but the authors say it has more than 10 million customers).
Anderson and Simester also apply their methodology to 7,219 book reviews (both positive and negative) on Amazon.com. In both cases, they explain, data collected by the websites makes it possible to match the review-writers to the purchases they may have made.
Anderson tells ABC News that the duo's study breaks new ground, in the respect that most studies of bad reviews have looked not at the behavior of customers but at the behavior of business people trying to make themselves look good (by posting positive reviews of their own goods) or their competitors look bad (by posting negative reviews of a rival's). "Nobody before us has studied individual reviewers," says Andersen.
When he and Simester told apparel company management that they were being slammed by their best customers, he says, "They were surprised." But that was just extraordinary finding #1.
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