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.
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:
Yeah, especially when it's a total nothing product 'we removed the useful bits of a phone and charge a big subscription for the free tool most people disable or ignore'
I feel like no one even needed a review to know this is trash
If that thing was a lightweight, cheap companion to a cellphone with a decent camera I could maybe consider buying it, because I do like some concepts like dealing with single tasks like adding an item to a todo list, playing a song, checking out a qr code or grabbing a video while I'm riding.
The way it is now it's a grandiose piece of crap, too expensive for its own good.
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.