My take on this is no they don’t. As long as they are truthful they only report on the quality of the product and prevent many people of spending a lot of money from losing it by buying something that doesn’t work.
If your product is shit your company does not deserve to be shielded from the backlash, this is the core of (classic) capitalism after all.
In today’s market, the perception or even the profitability of a product means nothing. All that actually matters is growth.
For a publicly traded company, or even one that just uses venture capital to start up; the product isn’t the thing that they might sell to consumers, it’s their brand. This is what gives them more capital to continue running the company and ultimately to profit.
This means that a company no longer needs to make good products, they don’t need to keep customers happy, they don’t even need to be profitable. All they need is to show growth opportunities to potential investors.
While this is possible for a couple of years, it is definitely not sustainable in the middle term. If that was true, then Ericsson and Blackberry would still have the biggest market cap in smartphones and GM, Ford and Chrysler would be the biggest car companies in the world.