A ski resort used a 1-star review in its ads, so now I’m inspired | Hacker News Reader

A ski resort used a 1-star review in its ads, so now I’m inspired

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112 pointsiamben50 comments

I always skim through the worst reviews for places, rather than the best reviews. Every good review is kind of the same, but bad reviews tell you useful information. If all the bad reviews are basically people complaining about minor service complaints, that’s usually a good sign. If they’re all about bugs or the rooms being dirty, etc, you should definitely have second thoughts.

I find this very useful for Amazon reviews too. If all the 1-star reviews are complaints about delivery or nonsense like that, the product is good. If they're all calling out a specific condition or a bad design feature, that's more than likely an actual problem with the product (e.g. frequent dead pixels on monitors or hiss on wireless headphones or some other annoyance).

I've recently been focused on the 2 or 3 star reviews because they're a bit more balanced and level-headed.

Of course take it into the context of the overall rating distribution for the product.

I take the count of five-star reviews and divide by count of one-star reviews. "Oh, it's an 11, that's a good product," I say to myself. Then I check the one-star reviews to see what people find problematic.

Not true, many complaints on delivery delay can point otwards a totally over-run company with eternal wait-times or massive scale up problems.

Anything that has multiple sellers it becomes completely irrelevant, especially if you have Prime and mainly get Prime deliveries.

It's got nothing to do with the product at all.

Unless you want delivery.

But delivery problems usually have nothing to do with the seller and will happen pretty much to any product at random.

Most of the time delivery problems have everything to do with the seller. The point is that the seller and the product should be separated in reviews of the product.

Sellers are the delivery companies' customer.

If there are a lot of delivery problems, it means the seller has chosen a poor delivery company which reflects poorly on them.

I don’t think that’s not necessarily true. I don’t know how it works now, but at one point I know that delivery companies like Postmates would take the end customer’s order, pay for it, pick it up, and deliver it, without the restaurant (necessarily) knowing that the courier wasn’t the actual end customer. In that case, clearly the bad delivery experience isn’t the restaurant’s responsibility, although at some point they might decide they need to take action to resolve the problem.

It depends. With a hostel for example, negative reviews will always mention the same thing (for every hostel). If you don't expect people to be loud late at night, smell of BO or a 'bad area' you shoudn't be staying in a hostel... yet they still do it.

Off-topic, but I do the same with student evaluations (I teach at a research university). This seems to be human nature: good reviews tend to be fairly generic ("nice", "clear", etc) but bad reviews are usually very specific.

On the flip side, when I write reviews, be it a product review on Amazon or in a referee report, I always try to include specifics in positive reviews.

I’d add a third metric: reputation of the reviewer. Yelp is full of glowing 5 star, and damning 1 star reviews from people who only ever write that one review. They tend to be short, one or two sentences, and once you start looking they’re everywhere.

Reputation can mean a lot, beyond just knowing who someone is.

That’s like the opening of Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Definitely, and in addition to what you mentioned, nobody intentionally buys bad reviews ;)

There’s the movie poster with a 2 star review: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend...

I didn't expect much from the abstract, but that's brilliant

The review says:

"I've heard Snowbird is a tough mountain, but this is ridiculous. It felt like every trail was a steep chute or littered with tree wells. How is anyone supposed to ride in that? Not fun!" Greg, Los Angeles, CA

Saw this in the comments...

>> I’m just a copywriter from Illinois who knows greatness when I see it.

> Do you wear a monocle?

If anyone ever gives me a monocle I will never stop wearing it.

Luke, your monocle will arrive at the office on Tuesday.

Received, thank you. The Internet is fun.

The Internet is awesome... but more importantly, are you still wearing it?

Yes. My wife has gone from amused to angry to inconsolable. Great monocle, 1 out of 5 stars.

I already love Snowbird and spent several days there last year. I saw this ad posted on their Twitter account and thought it was pure genius. They hit the nail on the head, because I friggin love the challenging terrain there. Although my true love in Utah is Brighton Resort :) They probably have the same sort of rediculous "Oh my God there's 'too much' powder" reviews. For the record as long as there's not a lot of flat areas there's no such thing as too much powder ️️️

Maybe they got the idea from Abstruse Goose http://www.abstrusegoose.com/527

I wonder how this can work in other cases though. After all, if their selling point is very difficult snow trails, and someone basically says that their trails are too difficult for him, then is it really a 1-star review?

It's cool that they can do this, but very few businesses can rely on this extreme segmentation...

"this food is too spicy" at a mexican restaurant. "The rides made me want to throw up" at a wild carnival.

They seem pretty easy to make. Find some feature, make it "intense", make someone whine about the intensity.

But yeah, it's not really a 1 star review, the guy just doesn't get it, and we are in on the joke.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."

"If nobody hates you, you’re doing something wrong"

Trying to be all things to all people means you'll likely be exquisitely mediocre. Excellence very often comes out of limitations, and designing whom your product is _not_ intended for can be more powerful than the opposite. Using honest feedback from someone you intended to not serve is a clever tactic and building something to get reviews like that might improve your business.

yeah you said it better :)

My favorites are the 1 star reviews of national parks. Such reviews have gotten some coverage lately in online outdoor communities. They tend to be either wilderness aficionados complaining that too many people are there taking pictures, or unprepared visitors complaining about the lack of amenities. To be clear, I can understand both (particularly the former, geez Yosemite), but both are examples of realistic expectations not factoring into the reviews.

One example: https://backpackers.com/20-hilarious-one-star-yelp-reviews-o...

Those are great.

My favorite is for Yellowstone National Park: It's like a bigger version of Central Park, only with bears.

"This post is offensive" on an ideas board...

> It's cool that they can do this, but very few businesses can rely on this extreme segmentation...

The entire sports industry is selling mostly racing gear to consumers who don't do any racing, and it's working quite well. Cars too, they're getting faster and more powerful every year, and most of us just sit in traffic.

Snowbird has green runs, so it's not that extreme, it's just a delightful ad. The segmentation is more about positioning: we've got the cooler, tougher stuff, the stuff that real pros use. Look at it that way, and you can see it all over the place, not just cars and sports gear, but computers and consumer electronics. People respond to the 'expert' choices, and it doesn't work as well to sell something as having less cachet, less for experts and more for the you the non-expert. Selling for less money works, but selling for less cool not as much.

I suspect clueless reviewers fill that gap just fine.

I've certainly seen some highly downvoted comments here complaining about HN being HN, for example.

Reminds me of how the Grauniad's negative review of the movie Legend was spun: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/sep/09/legend...

The most famous example of this kind of ad is VW's "Lemon" and "Think Small" campaigns from around 1960. Google image search for "lemon ad".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Small

Scenery porn + minimal information dense copy that nails their value position and target market in a nutshell ("wusses -- like this reviewer -- need not apply") + understated contact info.

It's a good formula to follow. You don't even need a 1 star review to follow it. Using a 1 star review as part of it has its own perks, like schadenfreude and irony and thought provoking plot twist. But, it isn't even essential to the basic brilliance of this piece.

As austrian and ex-competitive skier I can recommend Snowbird and it's associated venues wholeheartedly. It's great, with easy and difficult slopes, and fantastic management. The only thing which I didn't like was the restaurant in Russian neo-oligarch St.Anton style at the top. But this was just the architecture.

So they have it pretty easy to use such a review in their ads. The target audience knows how to take it

A similar advert for the Welsh Tourist Board a few years back:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nick_Clifton/publicatio...

Nothing like reframing the debate. Sort of like 1 star Amazon reviews where someone complains about never having to recharge a USB battery pack...

OP's company can do better than "Dare to be different" on their website after being inspired by all this amazing advertising.

weird to see someone unironically bragging about inventing the humblebrag.

for mobile development, maybe google should just "embrace the negative" instead of portraying the android ecosystem as a unicorn munching candy grass in a Bob Ross landscape

I agree this is a good ad from a tourist perspective.

The sad part is Snowbird is tracked within an hour after any snowfall. First tram up on a powder day at snowbird deserves all 5 stars but after that, it's a legitimate 1 star experience.

EDIT: unless you spent the night in the canyon and an avalanche takes out the access road :)

> First tram up on a powder day at Snowbird deserves all 5 stars but after that, it's a legitimate 1 star experience.

If you're a spoiled local like me, and only 3 feet of powder, only in the chutes where everyone goes, if that's the only thing worth considering, then I can understand your statement there. But even though I'm spoiled, I've never had anything close to a 1 star experience at Snowbird even on the groomers. I've skied there in 30-below when the snow actually stops working, and I still wouldn't call it 1 star. 1 star is what you get on the east coast and in California, when you compare it to Utah. We don't even have 1 star anywhere in Utah. Anyway, hit more Mineral Basin, I can usually find powder there days after any snowfall. Or find a friend with the early bird pass, Tram opens at 7am for a few "lucky" people.

> The sad part is Snowbird is tracked within an hour after any snowfall. First tram up on a powder day at snowbird deserves all 5 stars but after that, it's a legitimate 1 star experience.

And this is why I'm into ski touring these days. Crowds are minimal to non-existent.

> The sad part is Snowbird is tracked within an hour after any snowfall

Is there any resort where this is not the case?

I'm a solid intermediate snow boarder. Snowbird is uniquely steep/aggressive imo. Most other great mountains like Breck or whistler etc. have a combination of relaxing and tough. Snowbird just feels tough almost all the way down.

Good snow probably makes snowbird amazing, limited or tracked snow sucks there more than other places imo.

I don't think it's been like this in tahoe

Powder Mountain!

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