Marketers and creatives: read your reviews

The best advertising a product can get is a recommendation from one friend to another friend. That’s the holy grail of marketing, and what every brand aspires to. 

In my years producing commercials and ads, I’ve been involved in countless creative builds. For a long time, this required me to digest the brand, understand the product, learn the audience, and create something that speaks to all of that. Now, I do something way easier. 

I just read the reviews. 

When someone puts their name on the line to recommend a product, they’re not using all the fluffy marketing language that brands and creatives do. They’re saying what they really feel, and making comparisons that we’d have to be lucky to think up on our own. Customers are in a unique position to the product. They see it in a different way than founders and marketers and creatives do. Why? Because they actually bought it. 

Founders can get too precious about their product. It was their idea in the first place, so it must be good, right? Brand marketers can get defensive about their work. “How is this not the most popular thing on the planet yet?” Creatives can get opportunistic, seeing a product with rose-colored glasses to endear themselves and get a paycheck. 

Customers, on the other hand, saw something they didn’t have (and probably didn’t need), and decided to hand over their hard-earned resources to attain it. This is why we need to listen to them in our creative builds. They see the product with the clearest perspective of everyone. 

If a customer is recommending a product, creatives and marketers need to find out why. Of course, we should still do all the other stuff (digesting the brand, understand the product, learn the audience). But we leave so many great ideas behind if we don’t dive into the reviews.