This study engages with the enduring discourse in category research pertaining to the relative allure of typical versus atypical products to diverse audiences. While extant literature has extensively addressed audience heterogeneity, a discernible lacuna exists in the examination of how identical audience cohorts variably appraise distinct facets of a product—a phenomenon ubiquitously acknowledged in product markets as the “best-selling not applauded” conundrum. Adopting a framework rooted in reference group selection, this paper contends that audiences deploy discrete reference groups during the evaluation of a product's market and social performance. Consequently, an augmentation in audience evaluations of a product's market performance coincides with a concomitant attenuation in assessments of its social performance. Moreover, the articulated mechanism is empirically substantiated by scrutinizing the contingent factors of category density and product competition. A unique dataset on a digital platform in Chinese film industry provided strong support to the hypotheses.