MKBHD - Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?
My take on this is no they don't. As long as they are truthful they only report on the quality of the product and prevent many people of spending a lot of money from losing it by buying something that doesn't work.
If your product is shit your company does not deserve to be shielded from the backlash, this is the core of (classic) capitalism after all.
The reviewer should be truthful and fair. If that means trashing a shitty product then that's how it should be. Not calling out shitty products hurts the consumer and means the reviewer is doing a bad job.
He didn't even trash the product — he just accurately described it.
For anyone wondering, this is a response to a review Marques posted about Humane’s AI pin, which he called the worst product he’s ever reviewed. A member of the company complained he was going to kill their business:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/marques-brownlees-humane-ai-pin-review
Its a joke to think a single reviewer could hold that much power. Fact is, multiple reviewers are in agreement that it's shit.
Oh it was a member of the company? That's embarrassing.
Lmfao I had a feeling it was about humane. Marques' criticisms were valid af, as usual.
An honest review isn’t what’s going to kill their business. Even a bad product in and of itself isn’t necessarily what could cause the death of their business — it’s their not adequately tempering consumer expectations. From the sounds of it, they’ve oversold what the product can actually do, and are charging a price based on this fantasy.
If you’re honest in your marketing as to what your product can actually do, and charge a corresponding price then consumers and reviewers may be more forgiving. Where companies like this one which are doing fairly experimental stuff fail is when they over-promise and under-deliver. And reviewers will always take them to task when they do that.
Don't think he's a member of the company though.
What are we supposed to do? Give bad products good reviews so the poor little million dollar startup doesn't get its feelings hurt?
If we were talking about dishonest, malicious reviews, I'd understand.
That's not the case here though, not only is Marques' review honest, multiple reviewers reached the same conclusion as him.
Maybe try making a good product next time.
Absolutely. LinusTechTips had to issue a formal apology for dumb stuff someone had said about another reviewer, but in the unveiling of all their shit, it was revealed that they had mis-reviewed a gaming mouse.
The mouse was in prototype stages, and the LTT member that reviewed it did not take the plastic off the gliders and said that the mouse was horrible and dragged a lot. The company then floundered and had to sell the prototype and rights at auction at the next CES.
The worst part is that they assumed that a competent reviewer had the fucking common-ass sense to remove the plastic that... you know... comes on almost every gaming mouse, so they didn't even dispute the issue.
Ah LTT, the "go fast and break things" of the tech review world.
I'm legitimately shocked there are people defending the garbage Humane AI Pin, which leads me to think a lot of the criticism levied at MKBHD is made up by a PR firm working for the company. I already hated the god damn thing because it gave you hallucinations on demand. But watching his review and The Verge's review, its an overpriced gimmick that has a camera on all the time, and does nothing a smartphone can't already do. They didn't ask for bad reviews, they made a godawful MV--sorry, shitty product. Now they're gonna reap the whirlwind.
A smartphone is just better in every way imaginable. I also don't have my phone hallucinating all the time either, so I have that going for me.
I'm also gonna say the obvious quiet part out loud: He's black and they're targeting him first. Not The Verge, not Engadget, him.
I'd think a bigger difference is he's a single YouTuber, the Verge and Engadget are actual companies with $ and man power.
No, he's mentioned he has a team. He may be the final say on a product, but there's people under him shaping what he gets.
I respect MKB for the hustle and his success, but he's not a one man band.
They seem to think he is single at least..
No single bad review ever killed a product. Because we all know that some things are just a matter of opinion, user error, etc. Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. If I’m interested, I’ll read several positive and negative opinions.
But if your product is bad enough to warrant several bad reviews, that’s on you. Should’ve done better research, should’ve made a better product.
This video clearly wasn't "opinion" or "user error".
He put in heaps of work and throughly documented an extensive list of major problems, many of them are individually bad enough to sink the product. Put them all together... ouch.
On the other hand, he did have some positive things to say. There's scope here for this to be a good product. They just didn't make it happen. I think where they went wrong was creating a standalone device. It should be an accessory to a phone — similar to a pair of ear buds. You don't put an entire operating system, cellular connection, screen, voice assistant, etc in an ear bud. You put all of that on the phone and link the two with bluetooth.
He does excellent reviews and stuff in general.
I actually watched it before the ‘controversy’ and I think it certainly was a fair assessment. He clearly states the goal of the product and where it falls short. None of his criticism seems unreasonable.
Clearly, it’s trying to be an always-online communication, assistant and logging badge. Like a Star Trek commbadge on steroids. In theory, that’s a product that I’m very interested in. But when features are structurally unsound or actively annoying to use, well, I’m going to stick with the phone I’ve got.
Ironically, his ‘bad review’ got me interested to see what a version 2 will be like. Assuming they make it that far.
Well, Ralph Nader certainly was the catalist and voice that spelled the end of the Corvair and Pinto many years ago.
A plurality of negative reviews kill those companies that make bad products. And that's a good thing. Wheat from the proverbial chaff as it were.
Comcast is a great example.
It's not bad reviews that kill companies, it's bad products.
@Eyedust@lemmy.world has an example of a bad review killing a potentially good product.
"Bad review" as wrong review.
Generally speaking true. However some companies manage to get the hype train going which leads to people buying bad products. As a result, a company can still survive by selling bad headphones or bad water bottles. Bad reviews can balance things a bit, but if their marketing budget is as big as the defense budget of a small country, there’s not much a bad review can do.
Obviously, this doesn’t really apply to small startups with only pennies to spend. Their marketing consists of sending samples to reviewers, and if that gamble backfires, for any reason, things aren’t going to look very good for the company. Maybe the product was bad, and they had it coming. Maybe the product was ok, but the review sample was broken. Who knows.
this is a perfect example of why @PhAzE@lemmy.ca should get posts downvoted and account banned of most major platforms (dont actually do this but see what i did there?)
Yes, my comment assumes the reviewers are being genuine. However, in a lot of cases, those people can be weeded out and themselves fail over time because they, too, are peddling bad products (reviews).
This is the core of markets and markets have existed long before capitalism.
Sssssshhhhhh! You're scaring the Americans!
Good. Make better products and support them after you made them.
If your company sounds scammy and you say it can do things it can't, I hope your company burns before you burn customers who believed your lies
The baseline of this entire discussion is that not all companies deserve to survive. You make a good product - you grow. You don't make a good product - you adjust for the losses. There are no participation trophies there. Worst case scenario, someone will pick up on the same idea, and turn it into something actually good later on
I looked up what it would cost for me to buy one of these and run it daily.
After conversions and shipping, it would be $1100 to get one in my hands. It would be $50-60/month (Pin sub + data phone plan) to make it functional. And when the company inevitably folds in 1 to 2 years (or any of the companies they use for processing), the entire thing will turn into e-waste. It has literally zero on-device processing or functionality nor can it piggyback off your phone. It will turn into a paperweight.
This thing is a scam.
Reviewers aren't (or really shouldn't be) beholden to companies, the whole point of a review is to give an opinion on a product, and the less input into that the company has the happier I will be. At the same time, some reviewers do hold a lot of sway, and can strongly influence people's opinions with their reviews, so there might be an argument that a negative review can impact sales. However, so what? If the reviewer is bringing up their concerns or issues with a product, that is the whole point of what they do, and their viewers will want to hear about those things (working on the assumption that people will tend to watch reviewers they think align with their own views), and would be pretty upset if they weren't warned about the downsides prior to purchasing.
“Git gud companies” -MKBHD
Reviewer opinions on both Humane and Fisker are pretty consistently negative so this isn't some mean YouTuber with an axe to grind situation.
The products are bad and people shouldn't waste their hard earned money and time on them. Venture Capital firms may lose money, but that comes with the territory. Not every venture is a win.
As long as they are truthful they only report on the quality of the product and prevent many people of spending a lot of money from losing it by buying something that doesn't work.
Well, yeah sure. The problem is whether or not that's actually what's happening in any given circumstance. Most reviewers I've seen are more than happy to include personal opinion, and some will exagerrate points for the sake of getting views.
Things get even more fraught when the reviewer is a bigger company than the company whose product is being reviewed. For example the debacle with Linus Tech Tips and Billet labs that they were dragged for. That's the kind of coverage that absolutely can sink a company that seemingly only ever did exactly what they said they would.
Reviews are good if they present the important facts and generally act with integrity, but sometimes that's a really big 'if'.
I feel like in most cases if a product has such bad reviews that it kills the company that made it, there's a good reason for that.
Of course there are exceptions, and it is expected that a reviewer do their due diligence to make sure they're giving an honest, accurate, and reasonable review, but no company should be shielded for being told their product isn't good if it isn't.
I gave a keyboard wrist rest a 3 star review because the pad is this weird shape that gets narrower in the middle. From the images on Amazon, it looked like it was more or less rectangular. Rounded ends but with a consistent width throughout. The seller started harassing me to change my review to 5 stars. I reported them to Amazon. The emails from the seller stopped, I haven't bought something from Amazon since.
Sellers that demand or worse make up 5-star reviews are the ones who sell shitgarbage products and need to go out of business. Seeing 6 5-star reviews that all say "Great product! Would purchase again!" pretty much means the product will give you glans cancer and the doctors are going to have to cut off all the nerves that make it possible to orgasm.
I want to see a product get negative reviews by idiots. That's how you know the product is good and the source is genuine.
Give an example: I bought a little inverter that works with my power tool batteries. It can deliver 110V60Hz AC at 150W from a drill battery, plus it has USB ports. I've run a desk lamp from this during a power failure, or charged my cell phone. Works fine. I knew it was legit when I read people's reviews saying "Doesn't run my hair dryer. 0/10." Because there's plenty of idiots in the world who don't know how electricity works.
The problem on Amazon, especially for all these dropshippers that all sell mostly the same products: if you don't have the best rating, nobody will buy your shit. So here it might indeed kill the company. Or at least this listing.
For tech stuff, the best reviews to read are always the 1 or 2 star reviews, since you can see if the people complaining have legit gripes or they're just idiots who bought the wrong thing for their task.
He makes a pretty good point near the end of the video where he claims that reviews are only a catalyst, and only speed up whatever trajectory the company is already on. Assuming that the reviews are honest and objective I agree with this point 100%.
Ultimately the quality of the product or service on offer steer the ship, the reviews are just the wind.
Bad products lead to bad reviews, bad word of mouth, and bad reputation… which can - and does - kill companies.
But the first thing has to be true for the others to follow.
Entities like LTT have a very large audience and the opinion they put forward tends to influence a large crowd. Dishonest reviews about an emerging startup could ruin their customer basis.
Well, this is MKBHD who has an even larger audience
Well, this is MKBHD who has an even larger audience
And is known primarily as a reviewer.
LTT do some reviews, but that's not their primary focus.
Or, to use your example, reviews that don't understand the product or play it for laughs. 😅
Shitty products get shittier reviews. One bad review, even if it is by a big influencer is not going to kill a company. If a company has all of their eggs in one shit filled basket, reviewers are going to point out the shit and the company is not going to sell its eggs.
In today's market, the perception or even the profitability of a product means nothing. All that actually matters is growth.
For a publicly traded company, or even one that just uses venture capital to start up; the product isn't the thing that they might sell to consumers, it's their brand. This is what gives them more capital to continue running the company and ultimately to profit.
This means that a company no longer needs to make good products, they don't need to keep customers happy, they don't even need to be profitable. All they need is to show growth opportunities to potential investors.
While this is possible for a couple of years, it is definitely not sustainable in the middle term. If that was true, then Ericsson and Blackberry would still have the biggest market cap in smartphones and GM, Ford and Chrysler would be the biggest car companies in the world.
I was saying this over on YouTube... it's his responsibility to report tech developments accurately and responsibly, because today's tech developments are tomorrow's history. Future nerds need to know the score! Scooty-Puff Junior suuuuuuuucks!
Honest reviews prevent bad reviews from others and returns. They should be embraced for what they are and a blueprint for what you've done well and where there is room for improvement.
Product is an input, reviews are an output.
If your product can be killed by bad reviews you're either bad at making the product or bad at marketing the product. Managing a launch, including the relationships with reviewers, is part of shipping a product.
Now, that's for consumer goods. For artistic works it's a bit of a different beast and you can get a lot of other factors and definitely, by design, a lot more subjectivity. But if you're shipping cars and computing devices... yeah, no, this is a weird fixation to have. I'm guessing it's because it's the first time when whatever mismanagement happened becomes noticeable, so you can have the false impression that something was fine until the bad reviews told you it wasn't.
Although I'll say I've often owned and very much enjoyed products that don't review well. Computing device reviews in particular tend to focus on specific aspects, just because they're the easy A/B comparisons between the dozens of similar things they cover. The effect is sometimes only very general use devices get good reviews, so more specialized or targeted devices get worse marks just because they're not competing on the same areas. You see this a lot with gaming phones, and it stands out to me on a lot of the new PC handheld reviews, too. So if you ask me whether reviews can homogeneize a product and end up making every phone look the same? Maaaybe. Over time. Eventually. For most of the market, perhaps, but not all of the market.
Otherwise no, that premise is nonsense.
Very simple.
Shitty products and bad/greedy/sociopathic management kill companies. And guess what? They're shitty companies. They should die.
I think bad reviews can kill companies. If they are objective and honest, the review is not the core issue, the bad product is the issue.
But it is possible to have biased reviews, or dishonestly framed reviews. MKBHD is honest and objective, but you can't take for granted that every reviewer is.
I saw a comment on a Patreon that someone got a free copy of...one of those dime a dozen boom shoots for his YouTube channel. He has about 500-1000 subs, and he's getting a video game. He definitely didn't like it, and was having to reconcile if he wanted to give it an honest review or tell the PR firm that the product wasn't good. I feel like this push and pull is way too common.
MKBHD is pretty popular. His subscribers are probably the demographic that might be interested in this thing. So I'm sure his bad review has impact. But unless he's a big outlier or has a personal axe to grind with the company it does not seem like there's any ethical consideration to making such a harshly negative review. People should probably be more suspicious of the reviewers who don't give the product a harsh review.
There are a lot of reasons in here about how bad reviews kill products, but I didn't see mentioned how exceptional a product has to be to garner GOOD reviews. A business will get to the point of almost harassing you to leave a good review. In my experience people leave reviews when they are unhappy, and say nothing when they are satisfied.
An example of this was Teenage Engineering K.O. II EP-133 sampler. A bunch got released with broken fader knobs and the wave of bad reviews and complaints flooded in, drowning out the actual pros and cons of the device. T.E. isn't exactly floundering from it, but in another circumstance that could have killed the product (which I find to be phenomenal).
I hope they do I bought a nothing phone 1 after reading promises of how they wouldn't move to another phone until they had everything right etc.
Not only did they not keep it but after launching the 2 almost right after this claim they actively sabotaged the 1 the camera got worse the battery got way worse and thing is now super unstable and I really believe it's on purpose as custom roms make the phone great.
The company is dead to me but I am kinda enjoying seeing the phone 2 users now complain because they are starting to get the same treatment now.
I'm dead set in my belief that this happens to every phone, and I'm sad to see the nothing phone is going the same way.
I had a Motorola X that was suddenly dying in less than 5 hours and one day I couldn't even connect to my service. I looked and found that an update had uninstalled the phone's modem. Not even a factory reset helped.
After rooting and finding the correct package for my modem, the phone ran flawlessly using Resurrection Remix (I miss that ROM), proving that the battery and modem were indeed fine.
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Do bullets kill soldiers?
Infantry soldiers in the open, possibly. Soldiers in an APC? No.
Same applies to companies. A single sufficient bad review on a small, one-person company can take it out entirely. A single review of a big corporation? Not even one from a big shot like MKBHD.
This headline is dumb.
prevent many people of
This actually stuck out more than the comma splices.
I was writing on the phone and editing something and yeah, that's the result :D
I wonder if he would have made the same review if it was made by apple/samsung/google.
He did something similar for the Apple VR headset. Not as extreme, but probably because the product was not that shit.
So I am not a fan of the reviewer pictured for the same reason I don’t like Doug Demuro’s car reviews.
From what I see, they have very limited time with a product, and can tend to not understand it fully, and then add into their reviews tiny nitpicks that many people wouldn’t even notice on their own.
It seems like they look for something to complain about and that then goes viral as if it’s a huge issue with the product.
While I don’t think it necessarily “kills” a company or product, I think their reach is oversized for the low quality review they do.
What?
Doug Demuro goes over every single weird little feature in the cars he covers. What does he not fully understand? But I also don't conder his videos true reviews, I'm not in the market for 90% of the cars he shows, and I doubt many people are. It's entertainment, and for car enthusiasts it's fun to see a breakdown of a cool car.
As for MKBHD, I would say his smartphone reviews are some of the only ones worth watching on YT. He uses them for weeks as his main device and I've never seen him shy away from speaking his mind. Again, he's an enthusiast and his nitpicks are probably irrelevant to a lot of users. But that's exactly why I like his reviews, it's a different perspective that I wouldn't get anywhere else. Low quality? My brother MKBHD puts more effort into his b-roll shots than most channel put into the entire review.
I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but reviewing anything boils down to "how many things can I find wrong about this product". If I want all the gushy features and crap I would just watch the press release.
Doug Demuro has some different style of videos. He has his old school vids where he shows off interesting aspects of mostly older videos and now he’s also doing reviews of new cars. The second type is the one I’m referring to.
Doug did a review of a VW ID.4 in which he complained about how the infotainment system is “slow” and that got blown so out of proportion I do believe that it affected their sales significantly.
With MKBHD I agree with what you’re saying, and low quality was the wrong way to describe them. It’s more that they are noticing little things that the general population would mostly not notice or care about but then that becomes the whole story of the device.
It’s not that I think it doesn’t have a place, it’s just that these enthusiasts opinions get blasted wide and far by other media and it’s frequently not taken in the context in which the video is created. They (other media) will latch onto a nitpick and proclaim the product to be doomed.
It’s one thing to go looking for an enthusiast deep dive, and it’s another to amplify these complaints to the level that is done currently.
My point is basically that I think there is some validity that enthusiast reviews are able to affect the market too much. Not that these people shouldn’t make their videos, just they should not be taken that seriously and amplified by other media.
It’s not the content creators fault, but I do think it affects sales more significantly than it should.
There's a YouTuber who does gun reviews that I watch occasionally, and I wish other reviewers were like him. He pays for them with his own money, and Patreon money. If the gun is very popular he'll do a short video and label it initial thoughts, and then eventually he'll do a review after he's shot 1000s of rounds with it over weeks and months. If he notices something wrong, he'll look online to see if anyone else has similar issues and mention things like "I have an original model, which has problem X, manufacturer Y has since addressed this, and fixed it, and the community agrees it is no longer an issue. So look out for the first year release of X if you want to buy." Overall he does an excellent job of separating his opinions from selling points.
Yes I tend to like this but I wasn’t able to put it into words as well as you weee - someone who doesn’t just spout off their experience as if it’s the only one, but takes the time to understand if this is something that is only affecting them or if it’s the specific unit they have, etc.
Techmoan is the same way when he reviews a product and I’ve always respected his reviews a lot more because of it.
For phones, there is Smoorez, if he still does, what he was doing a couple of years ago.
This guy literally says he spends a week or two with each vehicle while demoing, same as car and driver does for their reviews. He’s not looking at it for 5 seconds then picking it apart.
Even if he does spend 2 weeks with them, he frequently talks about stuff he is out of his depth on.
Just because he had access to interesting cars doesn’t make him a good car reviewer. If I want to see what the inside of a Lamborghini Miura looks like, sure he’s probably got a video of it.
If I want to know anything about a modern car that I may purchase though, he’s one of the last people I’d look to.
who gives a fuck about companies?
People whose entire personality is what stocks they follow.
To the moon, bro!
I work for one and hope it goes well enougs so I can get my money for the work I'm doing.
Maybe the people who lose their job when they go under. That being said we shouldn’t prop up a bad business just because people might lose their livelihood
Companies also include small genuinely good startups and a dishonest negative review could ruin them.
Yes. Everyone agrees.
There's a different way to look at companies. They're not just profit-making entities. They are ways of organizing people to accomplish things nobody could do on their own. The profit is just there to keep the lights on and pay everyone a living wage.
Our current system doesn't encourage that approach, but that's just a problem with the current system.
People with jobs.
I have one, still don't care about the company or bad reviews about it when they deserve it.