What relationships can tell us about online reviews
As the owner of a business that has an online presence, you may feel frustrated with negative online reviews. Maybe it seems like they’re more common than positive reviews. Maybe it feels like most customers are very satisfied with your products and services, but you only hear from the people who are not satisfied. This tends to skew the information so that it looks like most of the reviews are negative, when you know that the public has reacted very differently to your products or services.
There are a lot of reasons why this happens, but one important thing to consider is simply the ratio of positive and negative interactions and how that changes someone’s perception. In fact, relationship experts have long considered the magic ratio to be roughly 5 to 1.
How does this influence online reviews?
What the 5 to 1 ratio means for relationships is that, in order for that relationship to be strong and successful, there need to be five positive interactions for every negative interaction. Researchers will sometimes talk about these as feelings, rather than interactions – i.e., that there needs to be five positive feelings for every one negative feeling.
But setting relationships aside, what this tells you about human psychology is that people need to have far more positive experiences than negative ones to have an overall positive perspective.
This is why people sometimes appear to be blowing small negative issues out of proportion. Maybe they didn’t quite understand the product that they were buying or something is not exactly how they expected it. That alone can be enough to trigger a negative review, even though there’s nothing else wrong with the product. It could even be something that the buyer would admit they are generally happy with, but they still leave a negative review because they wanted it to be even better. It’s not that people don’t like the products, but just that they perceive them as being less beneficial than they are. One negative experience can spoil a host of positive ones.
We understand how important your online reputation is here at Content Customs. Give us a call to find out how we can help.
