38For Whom the Bell Mobility Tolls1
Do you ever wonder what a consumer advocacy super hero would look like? The outfit. The weapons. The look they'd give to stare down the bad guys. Well, look no further. Today they are armed with a social media platform, a podcast, and a man bun.
Scott can remember the day he first gave an eBay seller a one-star review. It was a lifetime ago, and he'd bought a baseball card that never arrived. He left a review reflecting his thoughts on the missing card and the seller freaked out on him, claiming the review could ruin his business and this was Scott's fault—not the missing card.
Fast-forward to today and it seems everything online is five-star or bust: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, and even the App Store. As we've always said, if you make a good product and provide great service, reviews are the most powerful marketing you could possibly hope for. Of course, if your offering is subpar, well, reviews will reflect this and their affect won't be as pleasant. Giant, publicly hated companies usually don't stand a chance with online reviews. Airlines, cable providers, and cell phone companies liked it much better when we just nodded and paid our bills. But now that we have a voice, we're letting it be heard.
Such was the case up here in Canada, when Bell Mobility (the cellular arm of Bell Canada, of which Scott is a customer) released their original app:
As you can see, the app is rated an average of two stars, by 2,674 users. One of the tricks companies ...
Get UnMarketing, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
