Admit mistakes to sound more persuasive

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📝 Intro

You just received a video endorsement of your software from a big tech influencer. You can’t wait to use it as part of your marketing material.

Excited, you open it up and watch it. You’re slightly shocked though, when you see that the first minute of the video is spent talking about your direct competitor.

Even though the conclusion of that part is that “I was wrong to like it, I found something better”, it feels off. Aren’t you going to give free publicity to your competitor?

You’re tempted to ask the influencer if you can edit out that initial part when using the clip.

Research from Yale and University of Toronto shows that you shouldn’t.

P.S.: The tone of your voice can make you more or less persuasive. For example, sounding emotional made people 29% less persuasive.

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Recommendations and reviews that admit past mistakes are more persuasive

Topics: Reviews | Social media
For: B2C. Can be tested for B2C
Research date: October 2019
Universities: Yale University | University of Toronto

📈 Recommendation

Encourage reviews, endorsements, or recommendations of your product to include an admission of past mistakes when buying a similar product (e.g. the shoes I bought last month are already breaking, that was a mistake).

Include this in suggestions or guidelines when working with influencers, or in placeholder text when asking for customer reviews.

The recommendation or review will be persuasive.

🎓 Findings

• When a product review or endorsement admits a previous mistake reviewing a similar product (e.g. I said the last moisturizer I bought was amazing, but after a few days it gave me bad acne), it makes their current review more persuasive.

• As part of a series of 4 experiments, and an analysis of 5,727 reviews on Sephora’s website, researchers found that:

  • People rated Sephora reviews as more helpful if they mentioned a previous mistake using phrases like “my bad”, “my fault” and “mistook”

  • When people read a product review by a reviewer who admitted a mistake (vs didn’t):

    • A pair of headphones was chosen 34% more often

    • A speaker was chosen 12% more often

    • A florist was chosen 47.3% more often

  • When given the choice between a pack of Altoids mints or $1, people chose the Altoids 58.6% more often when shown a review mentioning a previous mistake in using another brand alongside 9 other reviews

• The effect only holds when a reviewer’s original mistake is in the same product category as the product they’re recommending.

🧠 Why it works

• We assume people try to learn from their mistakes.

• So we think reviewers who previously made a mistake have more expertise with that type of product.

• Since we consider them to have more expertise, their advice is more persuasive and we hold it in higher regard.

• In general, when a review shows expertise, exerts confidence, or uses more specific language, we consider it more helpful and useful, making us more likely to follow their advice.

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✋ Limitations

• Participants in the experiments were given two options to choose between after looking at reviews. In reality, shoppers would face multiple options to choose between, as well as the option not to choose any item.

• Other factors in a review, like the brand’s reputation, the reviewer’s credibility, and the irrelevance of the mistake (e.g. this dress was too small for me), might override the positive impact of admitting a mistake.

• The research focused on relatively low-stakes choices (choosing a pair of headphones, a florist, etc…). For high-stakes decisions (e.g. expensive purchases, a place to stay on vacation, a health-related product) it’s unclear if a reviewer admitting past mistakes would increase others’ confidence in their expertise. Admitting to mistakes on these purchases could be viewed as bad judgment, leading to reviews being less persuasive.

🏢 Companies using this

• Companies and review sites don’t appear to intentionally highlight product reviews that admit mistakes. Instead, they tend to highlight overly positive reviews.

• Influencers sometimes mention and admit previous mistakes, with celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain and Kim Kardashian going as far as apologizing for previous endorsements. However, it’s unclear whether they consciously use this as a tactic to make other endorsements more persuasive.

Tech influencer and reviewer Brandon Butch posts a video about the M3 iMac, highlighting issues that arose after his first review.

⚡ Steps to implement

• Look through reviews of your products to identify reviews where the reviewer admits to a mistake on a previous item they’ve bought in the same category. 

• Highlight these reviews as much as possible - move them to the top of the page, as the first review people see has an outsized influence on customers.

• You can also create a “Featured”, “Highlighted” or “Useful” section to make these reviews more prominent. 

• When you’re seeking reviews - best done around 10 days after the purchase - encourage people to make comparisons to similar products in their reviews to try and get people to mention past purchase mistakes.

• If you’re an influencer putting together a brief for influencer content - don’t be afraid to admit mistakes. Openly discuss mistakes made with previous purchases in the category and try to frame these as learning experiences (e.g. these headphones have great bass, but when I tried listening to podcasts I realized they weren’t great at voices, so now I test them for this too before buying).

🔍 Study type

Lab and online experiments and market observation (analysis of 5,727 product reviews posted on Sephora’s website)

📖 Research

Featuring Mistakes: The Persuasive Impact of Purchase Mistakes in Online Reviews. Journal of Marketing (October 2019)

🏫 Researchers

• Taly Reich. Yale University. 

• Sam J. Maglio. University of Toronto Scarborough

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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