Your competitor’s one-star reviews are your best brief

That review is about one med spa chain, and it may be the most useful thing a rival med spa could find. It says what went wrong, what the customer wanted instead, and what they’ll be wary of next time. It is a brief, written by someone who is ready to switch.

What makes people switch

Bob Moesta, one of the people behind the jobs-to-be-done approach to product design, has spent decades interviewing people about the moment they switched from one product to another. He and his colleague Chris Spiek describe four forces at work. Two move people toward a change: frustration with what they have, and the appeal of something new. Two hold them back: worry about the new thing, and the comfort of the old one. People switch when the first two outweigh the other two.

Most advertising works on one of the four, the appeal of the new. A competitor’s one-star review gives you the other three in the customer’s own words.

What one category’s reviews showed

We collected 190 public reviews of the largest chain in the med spa category, along with reviews of its rivals. One complaint kept coming back: the treatment hadn’t worked, and then came the pitch for more.

Sales pressure or upselling came up in 13% of the leader’s reviews, against 3% and 1% for two rival chains. Refunds came up in 15%, and in none of the rivals’ reviews. The leader’s unhappy customers are disappointed with results, and on top of that they feel sold to.

That hands every competitor a promise it can make without naming anyone: if a treatment isn’t working, we’ll tell you, and we won’t sell you more of it. The promise answers the frustration. It also answers the worry a switcher brings along, that the next place will do the same.

Why most brands miss it

Brands tend to look at their own reviews, to fix problems or to quote the good ones. A competitor’s reviews feel like someone else’s business. They are also scattered across Trustpilot, Google, Reddit and TikTok comments, and nobody on a small marketing team has time to go through thousands of them.

We do that work for brands. We gather what people say about a brand and its competitors, sort it by brand and by complaint, and flag what changes, such as a new complaint growing at a rival. The team gets the brief the switchers wrote, with the quotes to back it up.

Your five-star reviews tell you why people stayed. Your competitor’s one-star reviews tell you why people are about to leave, and what they need to hear from you.