When a good marketing idea goes bad, usually it’s the consumers who suffer and the lawyers who thrive. Take, for example, the recent case of RealSelf.com vs. Lifestyle Lift. RealSelf’s content is user-generated and discusses all things anti-aging, including medical procedures. Its success is based on its trustworthiness and the integrity of the reviews users submit and access.
Lifestyle Lift, allegedly, took advantage of RealSelf’s model, directing its agents to log fabricated, misleading reviews under pseudonyms. The courts will be working out the finger-pointing, but it makes this marketer wonder: just how credible are the social sites consumers consult for reviews about practically everything? It used to be that you’d ask your friend, neighbor, sister or mom for opinions about any number of things. Now, we turn to strangers whose motives could be questionable.
Don’t get me wrong; if Lifestyle Lift would have logged completely credible reviews by employees who had undergone their procedures, this could have been smart marketing. Instead, it just seems shady.
2 Comments
April 3, 2008 at 12:17 pm
All comments welcome.
April 3, 2008 at 3:01 pm
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=126001
Check out this interesting article about how trusted online content is vs print. Very interesting that the medical advice category has made the leap into online credibility but we just can’t trust what people.com says about Brittney.
“The web beat print for trustworthiness in one area: health and wellness, where readers preferred digital sources such as WebMD by 3%.”