Many consumers have been tempted to do so and not a few have ended up doing it. A consumer experience has been very negative, which has led to a certain level of exhaustion and exhaustion with the position of the brand or company that has starred in it.
Thus, the consumer takes out his smartphone, opens a social network or the company’s own website and unloads his fury. If he is very angry, he will end up writing in capital letters and pouring out all his anger, or simply accumulating messages of fed up. Your comment will become a blur on the reputation of the company and its products.
The company may try to respond with a conciliatory message. You may expect the message to be neutralized by all the positive comments and also by the fact that, in the end, the outbursts don’t seem like such a valuable thing. You are not saying much to other consumers beyond that that particular buyer is very angry.
However, the impact of these comments is very high, because they reach other buyers via subconscious perception. A study by analysts from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business and the University of South Florida Muma College of Business has shown this, addressing how consumers receive and process this type of comments.
To begin with, the researchers found that there is a divergence between the opinions that consumers find most useful when asked about the question and those that actually have a greater impact on their purchasing decisions.
The comments that appear as “top reviews” or that are tagged after voting by the users themselves as the ones that help the most are not the ones that usually have the most impact. Those opinions, no matter how much data they provide and as much as they help to understand what the product is like, cannot match the impact of angry comments.
“Angry opinions are typically discounted by consumers as less helpful than non-angry opinions, but counterintuitively they influence consumer attitudes and decisions to a greater degree,” explains Han Zhang, co-head of the study. . That is, you may think that that calm and data-filled opinion is the one that has influenced the purchase, but in reality your subconscious has been carried away by the message loaded with exhaustion that someone left.
They are the opinions that mark your purchase decision
The researchers reached these conclusions after subjecting the test subjects to six experiments. Participants were required to read product reviews online – the sample served different levels of anger – and were then asked to talk about how they had been helped, how they viewed the seller, and what purchase they would make. In the final results, angry comments ended up marking the purchase decision.
For example, in one of the tests, they had to choose between two retailers, who had similar opinions but one with more levels of anger. Consumers were left with the retailer with fewer angry comments. If the opinions were similar, it is important to highlight, there were equal levels of negative content. What changed was the emotional charge of those opinions.
Of course, all of this changes marketers ‘perception of purchasing decisions and the impact of other consumers’ opinions, but it should also make them consider more of the strategy. Very angry opinions have never been desirable, but it was assumed that consumers valued them less – they do, right – and listened to them less also because of that emotional level and their little weight information. However, no matter how much consumers rationalize it, these messages have a high impact on the final purchase decision and marketers cannot underestimate it in their strategy.