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Do you sell to people who don’t know any better? Who don’t read reviews? Don’t have Facebook? Don’t have Twitter? Then you will be out of a job soon. You see as the world moves closer to “perfect information” where everybody knows everything, it’s going to be insanely difficult to market garbage as gold. People’s social circles are being amplified by social media so that when Anjay from New Delhi tries out a new product and it sucks, he will not only tell his friends and family about it but he will also tweet or update his Facebook about it. If Anjay really doesn’t like it he may even write a review on Amazon or Ripoff Report.

Word of Mouth(s)

Guess what happens next? Mary in Los Angeles, Jacob in Toronto and Jenny in Tokyo all have the same problem and amplify Anjay’s review by retweeting, liking, commenting, reviewing their own experience with the crappy product. People on message boards chime in as well as people writing on their blogs and when the next customer Googles’ reviews on your product: All of your terrible reviews come up and to paraphrase soup Nazi, “no sale for you”. You now have two choices.

No sale for you!

Hire a Hit Man

(1) Hire a reputation management firm that will scare these users into removing their blogs, comments, etc. This is a very bad move to make because you are going after the influencers, not the suckers. As someone that has received C&D’s from reputation management firms I end up talking more smack about the product and vow to myself to make it my crusade to bash the product into oblivion. It should be a mortal sin to upset the influencers. On top of this, this isn’t a long term strategy as your product will still be garbage and will gain more and more bad reviews which will make their way up Google’s search listing as more and more people share, RT, link and Like them. This is good (in the short term) for the company you hired because they’ll get more of your money, but bad for you because you will eventually lose all your money (and they’ll lose a client).

You're competitors are not the only thing he will hurt.

Make it a Hit man!

(2) Make your product better. Duh? The only thing left to do is listen to what users are saying. If they are saying your customer service sucks, your delivery times are too long, your clothing falls apart after one wash, why not devote resources to improving the product? Why not spend whatever it takes to make the best product possible? Why not put the resources you we’re going to put into marketing garbage and then managing the fall out of marketing garbage into giving the world a product that goes above and beyond what people expect? Then again your target market is suckers because your product sucks.

The greatest product that sucks.