How Phony “Customer Complaints” Can Sway Our Perceptions

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One-star ratings can destroy consumer confidence. Even if a product, restaurant, or gig worker has dozens of five-star ratings, a handful of one-star ratings can wash away positive perceptions. It takes lots of five-star ratings to counterbalance a single one-star rating.

Anecdotally, disgruntled customers and saboteurs know that their justified or fictitious complaints have tremendous clout. A new "chocolate chip cookie study" reaffirms the power of negative labels to undermine consumer confidence.

In a simple but elegant experiment, researchers at Ohio State University set out to gauge how priming expectations with three different labels—negative ("consumer complaints"), neutral ("factory typical"), and positive ("new and improved")—affected people's perceptions of generic saltine crackers and chocolate chip cookies. These findings (Cotter et al., 2022) will appear in the April issue of the peer-reviewed journal Food Quality and Preference.

For this study, first author Maria Cotter and OSU colleagues recruited 120 participants aged 18 to 70. In a side-by-side comparison, chocolate chip cookies from the same packaging sleeve were secretly placed on three different plates before each study participant did a taste test.

One plate was labeled "factory typical," another plate had a "consumer complaints" label, and the third plate was tagged "new and improved." They did the same setup for saltines.

Before each taste test, participants were told, "You will be evaluating a major supplier's current typical factory sample, a new and improved prototype, and a sample that has received customer complaints."

After taking a few bites, participants rated how much they liked each sample using a nine-point scale ranging from "dislike extremely" to "like extremely." They also rated the crackers for crispness and freshness and scored the three differently labeled cookie samples for "flavor intensity."

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Consumers Are Skeptical of "New and Improved!" Marketing Hype but Are Easily Swayed by Complaints

Even though the cookies and crackers were from the same packaging sleeve within their respective boxes, negative labeling significantly influenced taste perceptions. With both foods, overall likability scores were much lower for samples labeled "consumer complaints" in comparison to the uptick in likability for those labeled "new and improved."

As expected, Cotter et al. found that ratings for the "factory typical" samples fell somewhere in the middle. That being said, the researchers were surprised that "new and improved" labeling didn't move the needle in a positive direction nearly as much as "customer complaints" labeling moved likability scores in a negative direction.

"With the negative contextualized messaging, there were more negative attributes selected—people didn't like it as much, [they thought] it wasn't as fresh," senior author Christopher Simons said in a news release. "The positive messaging slanted toward being more positive, but not nearly as much."

This research suggests that negative customer complaints are more significant and memorable than positive claims designed to hype a product. In general, people tend to be skeptical of marketing claims such as "new and improved" but are quick to believe negative consumer feedback.

For product developers who want to increase the likelihood of a product launch succeeding in the marketplace, Simons recommends addressing legitimate negative concerns right out of the gate to reduce the oversized risk of customer complaints. "You get a bigger bang for your buck by removing things people find negative than you do by optimizing [a product's] positive attributes," he said.

Negative Labeling Sways Perceptions More Than Positive Labeling

For anyone who's subjected to reviews when selling goods or services, this research reaffirms what many people have already figured out: Negative reviews prime consumers to dislike what you're selling more than over-the-top glowing reviews move the needle in a positive direction.

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The bottom line: Negatively-biased descriptions impact consumers more than positively-biased descriptions. Knowing that we're more likely to be swayed by negative reviews and "customer complaints" than compliments highlights the importance of "self-checking" how biased labeling might be influencing our ability to be objective as consumers and in everyday life.