Intro
At this point, you’ve chosen your product, you’ve validated it as a viable business idea, and you’re ready to start asking customers to pay for it.
But how do you go about getting customers to pay for your freshly-minted product? To do so is the most difficult part of any marketing strategy.
It is not enough to know that people want your product. You need to convince them that they actually need it. That they will be able to use and enjoy it. That they will want to use it on a regular basis and repeatedly. What better way than by having good press?
Brands don’t start out with press; they begin with press releases and public relations work, with blog posts and social media posts, with advertising and PR work. If you can convince people that your product or service (or service in general) has something useful or useful-ish about it which others have not yet found, then you can start selling them on the value of using it… eventually convincing them that the value of using their product is worth paying for.
Teeth Whitening Reviews: Bad vs. Good
Smile brilliant bad reviews were one of the first things I did on my new blog. It’s a simple post that summarizes some of the most useful resources I have come across and which gives them their own little “halo” (the smile) to help distinguish them from other sources.
Since then, there has been plenty of repetition of the same thing:
• For teeth whitening products, you want a good review, and especially if you are considering purchasing it.
• It’s fine to just read the testimonials and see if they are worth it or not.
• The reviews should help you distinguish between good and bad reviews, but they can’t help you figure out if this is something you want to buy or not (if it weren’t for those bad reviews, I would never have bought Smile Brilliant).
Which leads me to my next point:
• A Bad Review is Not a “Bad Review.”
This is a valid point. But think about this for a second: why would someone write such a review? If they love an item, why would they put such a negative thing in their review? If they hate it, why would they put such positive things in their review? A little bit of research suggests that this isn’t how most people think about writing good reviews — perhaps (probably?) because we assume we all want to be honest in our evaluations. Notice that I didn’t say “good reviewers are brave enough to give bad reviews” — instead, I said “bad reviewers are brave enough to write bad reviews.” So let me explain why I think this is true: When we compare positive vs negative feedback on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Reddit (or even our own personal websites), we often feel like we don’t know what people mean when they say they don’t like something (or something else). Our brains can only process so much at once; so when faced with two seemingly different ways of saying the same thing, our brains absorb more information than we should and start filling in some gaps left by those who actually know what they mean (which leads us down one of two paths). We usually choose one path because it “feels right.” But if we were actually trying to understand what others meant by their words, then we might conclude that both were not quite
The Dangers of Brushing Your Teeth
If you’re reading this, you’ve already experienced a bad review. This article is for anyone who has.
Why do some reviews make us angry? Because they are written by people we don’t know, by people we don’t trust, and who have an agenda that threatens our happiness. They are slanted, they are biased, they are often uncritical of the product in question. Sometimes the reviews seem to be motivated by malice (of the sort that makes some tragic accidents possible). Sometimes they seem to be motivated on a case-by-case basis (as in the case of a specific product or its specific feature). There is no way to know for sure. As with any human behavior, there may be some fairly simple explanations for why someone does what they do. And we can’t help but wish it were better.
But we also know that our own behavior is not always perfect or consistent (see “this is how I see things” below) and so we try to keep an eye on it even when we can’t help it. And while that doesn’t always work out, it does in many cases:
It helps us avoid repeating those mistakes and understand what might be going on better than anyone else could without our knowledge or consent;
We can make changes so as to improve our performance and/or protect ourselves from future risk;
And so long as every review is really just one person telling their story — not a carefully thought out attack designed to smear someone’s reputation — there isn’t much you can do about it but either ignore it or treat it respectfully (and treat your customer base accordingly).
As with any important business activity there will always be bad reviewers out there: no matter how many great customers you have and how much respect and credibility your company has built up over time (in particular, especially if your company has been around for a long time), there will always be people who don’t like you or your products enough to bother with good reviews at all . You shouldn’t let these people get away with anything: if they’re acting maliciously — even if you think that’s not likely — then ask them nicely to stop before things get ugly—even if the only thing preventing you from doing this is the fact that you don’t want them talking about your product more than once every 7 years or so… …You don’t have to worry about those
The Benefits of Brushing Your Teeth
In the comments section of this post, I was asked what is the difference between a bad review and a smile brilliant bad review. Both are bad, but one is a smile brilliant, and the other is not.
A smile brilliant review is like a bad review in that it’s ugly, vague, unsatisfactory and unhelpful; but unlike a bad review, it’s not explicitly wrong. A smile brilliant review is an observation that “the product was great in some way X”; this observation may be true or false, while a negative review (a “you didn’t say something good about this product!”) is an unsupported statement which may be true or false.
The difference between smile brilliant reviews and negative reviews comes down to the quality of evidence that supports the statement being made. A positive (or especially neutral) positive review may be based on personal experience with your product (a fact such as “I just bought an iPhone 6″), but it won’t necessarily support a statement such as “I just bought an iPhone 6″ or “This app does everything I want it to do well and better than other apps of similar functionality for similar price points.”
The way to differentiate between these two types of reviews is to focus your efforts on improving those aspects of your product that you think speak most loudly about its value proposition. Doing so will help you build a stronger case for why your product should be liked by people in general — regardless of their individual experiences with your product — than if you had instead chosen to focus on customer complaints and user concerns (which can often be heard loudest).
More generally:
• If we have something truly pithy to say about our product we should make sure we are being specific — don’t just write something like “you couldn’t tell me what my password did without looking at the settings menu!” without explaining how that works — then if there isn’t anything pithy enough to say we can leave it out (the value proposition is more important than any particular feature).
• We shouldn’t try to communicate our value proposition through anecdotal evidence alone: “I don’t know what I thought my password did when I first installed the app” or “I never had any trouble finding my password” are both weak statements because they don’t actually explain what’s unique about our app; neither does “
Why You Should Brush Your Teeth
“A bad review is a criticism of the product or service. A good review is a criticism of the reviewer’s preconceptions, biases and assumptions.”
I just made this up, so it probably doesn’t matter much to anyone but me. But I thought I would share anyway.
Why should you brush your teeth? Because you like to smile at people? Or because you want to seem polite? Do you actually remember what you used to be able to do as a child? Or are you just making this up in your head as some sort of self-help thing?
That’s what “reviews” are for: they help us get people to think about why we do what we do, and make us question our own assumptions. That can be very valuable if we take it seriously enough — but sometimes we need some help with that too.
For example: A few months ago I read a review of Mint that said: “The app is not worth $1 (free) for 99 cents (free) for 99 cents (free). The actual app value is $0.99, and the free version does not have any useful features other than being able to export an email address list of contacts that can be used in certain tasks on the website or when signing into the app itself. It works great for sending plain text emails from your contacts list; however, this functionality is only limited by having access to an email account where such emails are stored on one’s computer before being transferred over via Wi-Fi. The fact that there isn’t any real security protection here makes it far less reliable than anything else out there in this price range; and then there are ads popping up everywhere in between using data ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?????????? ? ? ? ????
Wow! That was pretty bad! And I know it was written by someone who doesn’t work at Mint, who isn’t highly engaged with the brand or community … who doesn’t have the power or influence needed to put something like that on their site! Those poor people! They have no idea
Conclusion
The internet is an absolute monster. It’s like the darkest, most demented corner of the darkest, most demented corner of the universe. There are no rules in there and the more you get involved in it, the more your life is turned upside down by its vastness — which is a good thing because it’s really interesting stuff here.
However, we have one rule: don’t let it mess up your face! So don’t smile brilliant bad reviews about us on Google. Don’t share them with people you would like to meet or patronize them. Don’t try to make money by writing a review that has nothing to do with our product or service (we can only be honest when we want to be). Please just try to not smile brilliant bad reviews about us at all (and I mean this sincerely).
And if you do want to make money we are not against that either; but if you want to make money then get out of our way.