ORIGINAL POST: I remember the day I gave an eBay seller a 1 star review. It was a lifetime ago, and I had bought a baseball card and it never arrived. I left a review reflecting my thoughts on it. The seller freaked out on me, saying I could ruin his business since it wasn’t a five-star review and it was apparently my fault.

Fast-forward to today and it seems everything now relies on 5-star or bust: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon, the AppStore. I’ve always said if you make a good product/give great service, reviews are the most powerful marketing you could possibly hope for. If your offering is sub-par, well, it isn’t as pleasant.

Giant, publicly hated companies usually don’t stand a chance. Airlines, cable providers and cell phone companies liked it better when we just nodded and paid. But now that we have a voice, we’re letting it be heard.

Such was the case when up here in Canada, Bell Mobility (the cellular arm of Bell Canada, of which I am a customer) released their original version. The app was rated on average 2 stars by 2674 users - not great.

Usually at this point, a company releases a new version, which sort-of wipes away the old reviews because the default display in the AppStore is the newest “version” of the app’s reviews, not “all reviews”. But not Bell Mobility. Their developer account is “Bell Mobility Inc.” on the first version, however when they released a new version of the app last week, it was launched under “Bell Canada”: