Last week I bought The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World at the Camden Arts Center. The title intrigues, the blurbs even more (”A masterpiece” Margaret Atwood; “Tiger Balm for tired minds” Sunday Times). Only thing that held me back was the fact that it’s 20 years old. And everything ‘creativity’ before the Interwebs seems like potentially an outdated story - silly, i know.
Anyway, back home I check the book on Amazon to read some reader reviews and I was reminded of the wonderful psychology and the power of of polarity of opinions/reviews. (and how Amazon are so bloody great at social design)
I’m sure there is somewhere a proper research on the selling power of polarity (reference much appreciated) but look at this little piece of infovisual:
That’s pretty much how you want people to react to your product. This is a fairly niche book so volume of reviews isn’t high but that U shape where there is a majority of great reviews vs. few very negative and very little in between is million times more effective than loads of 3 stars reviews.
It’s not the lame meme of ‘bad publicity is good publicity’ that is at work here. Rather, it’s the fact that there are few people who (vocally) don’t get why most of the people find it so great and so a new reader wants to try the product for himself to decide which camp he belongs to…
I’ll report on the book later. Or not.
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