Search the Archives

  • One way to deal with negative word of mouth

    Posted on March 6th, 2009 by Spike and currently 15 commenting.

    Embrace it.

    Because it’s a part of you. Your story. Your history.

    Enter Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco. They, like just about all restaurants, get reviewed on Yelp. And, like just about all restaurants, they get some weird, negative reviews peppered in with the good ones.

    But what did Delfina do instead of trying to ignore them? They took the quotes from some of the one-star reviews and printed them on t-shirts for their employees to wear. Like what? Like this: “This place sucks.” And “The pizza was soooo greasy. I am assuming this was in part due to the pig fat.”

    These guys turned negative reviews into an asset. They made the negative into a positive. It now works FOR them instead of AGAINST them.

    It’s the first question we get asked when talking with a potential partner: “What if someone says something BAD about us?” And we respond with, “We’re pretty sure they already are. But now you get a chance to become a part of the conversation.” There are no brands that everyone loves. That’s la-la land. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: “LIKE” is not a Brains on Fire word. We want people to LOVE you or HATE you. Because now you’ve got something worth talking about. LIKE is a death trap. LIKE has no emotion. And people could care less.

    Embrace the fact that some people hate you. It’s so great to know that not every one is drinking your Kool-Aid or sitting in your camp. It’s what makes the world go ’round. And by embracing the negative, it will make you better. It will show that you’re listening. And you’ll soon find out that the haters make the lovers love you even more.

    What a beautiful thing.

    (Big ‘ol hat tip to Eric Dodds for the lead.)

    Share The Love
    SubscribeBlinklistBloglinesBlogmarksDiggdel.icio.usFacebookFurlMa.gnoliaNewsVineRedditStumbleUponTechnorati
    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
  • http://www.800ceoread.com Jon

    Understood, but internally, is there something demoralizing about employees walking around with a shirt that says, “This place sucks?” It’s funny, and might be inspiring for some to make a change, but it could bring people down, too. This data can certainly be used, and this was one way of putting it to use. I’d like to see how the effects of it play out within the company.

    It certainly starts a discussion for customers. It’s wearing your faults (literally) on your sleeve, and saying to people, “This is it. We’re doing what we’re into, but not everyone else is into it.” It creates that love/hate choice. If I saw employees wearing these shirts, I would be prompted to decide, “What do I think about this place?” So often we consume out of complacency/convenience. With all the choices available to us, we deserve more than that.

  • http://www.thriveyourtribe.com/blog Jessica @ThriveYourTribe

    What a fabulous story! I love this lighthearted approach. Sometimes clients are just crackpots, and sometimes a company just isn’t the right fit.

    For the rest of the day, I’m going to go around repeating the line, “Embrace the fact that some people hate you.” Because, really, it doesn’t get much better than that!

  • http://none Matt

    What I would really enjoy hearing is one of the employees explaining what the shirt said to a customer! HAHA

  • http://vikki.me vikram

    Following Jon, I’d like to see the effects of this experiment to the business.
    But I would not personally recommend such a system. One- it spotlights the defects to other customers who might still be on the wall (neutral).
    Two- there could be some cases where showcasing defects and benchmarking on them to improve are good. But in most cases, such a negative response is not something the business doesnt know- rather it is that way because that is the niche the business has chosen. If the example above was an italian pizza place, a greasy pizza is sure something to put up on the score card and show improvement; if it is a player competing on speed of delivery (McDonalds) or price, it doesnt make sense to “work” on this defect at all. And putting up a case of negative word of mouth and NOT working on it is the worst thing that could happen.

    A logical alternative is- monitor the negative word of mouth, work on it, and showcase the NEW NON GREASY pizza on the menu to your customers when you publish the negative comments on the t shirts.

  • http://ubereye.wordpress.com Bill Gammell

    Good stuff here.

    First we had the unedited customer reviews on CustomInk.com’s website, then Zappos.com came out with their unedited employee-written culture book, and now we have Pizzeria Delfina.

    Are blemishes now a valid form of attraction?

  • http://www.copy-cat-copywriting.com Cathy Goodwin

    I’d have to agree with Jon and Vikram. It would be interesting to learn how employees feel about wearing these shirts and, more important, how customers respond.

    You can’t assume all negative comments are wrong. I just wrote a negative review about a concierge and cleaning service here in Seattle. After working for me for over 7 months, they demanded I add more hours to my weekly cleaning service or they would quit. I voted for “quit.”

    My beef wasn’t about hours. I wanted 2 hours. They claimed the housekeeper had stayed 3 to 3-1/2 hours a few times w/o charging me. Now, as it happens, I left before the housekeeper started work. My dog walker arrived about 2.5 hours later to find the house had been thoroughly cleaned and the housekeeper was gone! So I asked for dates/times. They refused.

    They also claimed they wrote me an email “about 2 months ago.” When I asked for the exact date, as well as a copy, they backed off. The only email I’d gotten was an attempt to upsell me to a new
    type of service.

    So they truly deserved a negative letter. The whole point of hiring a service (not an individual) is that they negotiate this stuff behind the scenes and I suspect it was all a ploy to get me to add hours or go away after my neighbors dropped the service. They didn’t want to come for just 2 hours.
    I would want to warn others who might hire them.

  • http://copylicious.com/blog Kelly Parkinson

    Pizzeria Delfina is my favorite pizza in San Francisco and possibly ever, except for this one little place in Brooklyn. I have to say, knowing how good their pizza is, and knowing what their employees are like (pleasantly truculent), this t-shirt idea is brilliant.It reinforces the feeling that their REAL customers are special. It makes us (REAL customers) feel like we alone are capable of appreciating truly great pizza. They’re not trying to be all things to all people. Which is why I love them. Knowing their employees, I’ll bet they like wearing these t-shirts because they don’t want everyone to love their pizza. They only want cool, nice people to love their pizza. And everyone else, people who love to criticize everything, who don’t appreciate great pizza, who want Domino’s and Pizza Hut, is fair game for t-shirt ridicule. Love this idea.

  • Ryan

    Interesting idea, but it is encouraging the wrong sort of behavior. Now people will write negative reviews on yelp in the hope they too can be featured on a tshirt :)

    R

  • http://www.tradeshowinstitute.com Traci

    Perhaps it is Pizza that encourages this type of behavior. Friends of mine own a ‘flat bread’ restaurant in Philadelphia and had the pleasure of receiving a bad review in one of our alternative weeklies. It turned out to be great for their publicity as at least 20 plus customers wrote in (all were published online and many in print the following week) to say what an inaccurate review it was…all of them raving about the restaurant. That led to many writing in saying they had never been there but all the hype made them go and they also thought the place was great. The owners decided to run ads in the offending paper…big ones too…that quoted the review touting their “mediocre food and weak beers”.

    Philly, however, is a ‘small’ town so anyone that sees the ad will ‘get it’. Perhaps it could backfire in other places.

  • http://www.101worldwide.com Robert Gibbs

    An excellent word-of-mouth advocate here in Chicago said:

    “not participating in negative word of mouth is like refusing to go to the doctor because you don’t feel well” (Andy Sernovitz… check out his book on word of mouth marketing).

    Basically, social media and word-of-mouth are living and breathing forms of communication (and in 2008, social media actually surpassed email as the leading form of communication – the nielson group). So Pizzeria Delfina makes a great example of the fact that nobody can get squeeky clean reviews all the time, and there will always be a handful of negative people leaving negative comments (and nutso people leaving nutso comments).

    Some negative word-of-mouth derserves to be left alone… everyone can identify comments/discussions that are obviously crazy or written by competition, so there’s really no need to get involved. But legitimate customers who leave less-than-great reviews deserve to hear back from you… if a customer calls to complain about their meal/expereince you wouldn’t just listen and then hang up (ok, maybe sometimes), so why treat social media any differently.

    Guest Pulse (www.guestpulse.com) is a service created specifically for restaurants and hotels that finds positive AND negative guest feedback on every social media site out there. It can also be used to monitor what people are saying about your competition… ultimately doing all the leg work for you and serving up relevant lists of customer conversations for you to respond to (or not). And it’s a lot more than just social media monitoring… At the very least it’s an affordable way for single and multi unit operators to track guest opinions and fuel positive word of mouth, but if you use it to fully embrace social media (or even to replace your old expensive ads in the local paper) it’s a way to connect with your customers, turn them into advocates and proactively grow your business.

    In addition to http://www.GuestPulse.com – small and medium restaurant and hotel businesses can reduce thier marketing/advertising costs by making the most of other innovative services out there that eliminate the need for wasting money on traditional marketing/advertising activities. Such as http://www.constantcontact.com and http://www.exacttarget.com or http://www.modernpostcard.com …all basically help to build up your dialogue with customers (and your sales!) and you can stop wasting money on “restaurant marketing agencies/consultants” who promise big creative ideas with absolutely no results.

    Well done Delfina!!! At least your getting involved and starting these discussions… now where’s my wholegrain thincrust cheesless spinach pizza? ;-)

    Robert Gibbs (not the one in the White House)

  • Blake K.

    This is brilliant. Now I want to have my own t-shirt made up about Pizzeria Delfina using some of the other negative reviews. Then walk proudly into the restaurant wearing it in front of all the customers.

    Imagine a shirt where the front of it is emblazoned: “Delfina did me wrong… I know the symptoms of food-borne-illness… you nearly sent me to the ER and that ain’t cool.”

    or: “It was an expensive pizza experience that would have been disappointing at any price.”

  • http://brainsonfire.com Spike

    Robert – I’ve recently heard about GuestPluse as well. Great idea. And as for Andy’s book, READ IT? BRAINS ON FIRE IS IN IT!!!

    Blake – I’m with you. Let me know when you get yours!

  • http://www.oddpodz.com oddpodz

    This is a fun idea and a novel way to take on the naysayers…as long as the employees and customers don’t believe what’s on their shirts!

    We always tell people that if everyone likes you, you’re doing something wrong.

    And, sometimes, the biggest critics just want to be heard. We’ve found that when we listen to them, respond to their complaints, some of them have become our biggest fans and brand ambassadors.

  • http://www.JamieRoxx.com Jamie Roxx

    As a painter, it’s all part of the game. Most of our bad press is from other artists who probably get a little jealous with their lack of success. However a few years ago I did let it bother me, to the point of being not as productive as I should have been and letting it affect my bottom line. However I got similar advice from my father (not in the art business, but he always seems to have some great ideas). So we did embrace it. We started up a hate mail blog where people (lovers, observers, anyone) can make comments etc etc. We even link to it on our main website. Business went back up I think mainly because we could control it and deal with it, even indirectly and in a tongue and check sort of way. This has worked out well for us.
    ~Jamie Roxx

  • http://www.1800postcards.com Postcard Printing Company

    Wow! Remember folks – there is no such thing as bad publicity.