Examples of Testimonials – Examples of Testimonials versus Professional Opinion Part 1
One of my colleagues as a podiatrist. He is board certified and has been in practice for many years. He has large patient base and is well liked and well respected by as patients. As a podiatrist, he deals with a lot of issues involving feet. One of those issues he is commonly asked about in the office and on the street is about shoes.
People are always asking him: what are the best shoes to buy? How would you choose a type that won’t hurt my feet? What about high heels? But the most aggravating types of questions that he receives about shoes involve something a patient has seen on TV. The most notorious examples are regular TV commercials, infomercials, and sales pitches from shows like Home Shopping Network or QVC.
All of these marketing pathways involve extensive use of testimonials. Surely you’ve seen them yourself. Some celebrity pitch man or pitch woman is featuring a new line of shoes and everyone and their brother is calling in to say a great they are.
In one particular case, a new style of shoe being advertised had great testimonials. The only problem was that these particular shoes were reported to be harmful in all the scientific and medical literature. The harmful effects of this particular style of shoe had been well known and documented for at least that at last 10 years. This is something that would have been common knowledge to every podiatrist. However, when the podiatrist related this information to a patient interested in buying them, the patient got very upset and defensive.
The patient went on and on about how one of their favorite celebrities had promoted the shoes and all the testimonials about them were wonderful. The patient accused the podiatrist of being an elitist and biased against her favorite celebrity! How could all of those nice people giving testimonies be wrong?
These are examples of testimonials and the power they can have. This is not unusual. I have found in my own practice that examples of testimonials by uninformed laypeople can be far more powerful than professional opinion. In fact, they can be far more powerful than Scientific Data and fact that contradict them!
In part to, we will look at examples of testimonials to see why they are so powerful. In part three, we will examine why, at least in Health Care, professional opinion is more important and how to use it to evaluate health related things you may want a buy.
Examples of Testimonials – Examples of Testimonials versus Professional Opinion Part 2
In part one of this article, I discussed a very common example of how examples of testimonials can be more powerful than professional opinion.
