If you believe, like I do, that happiness is about expectations management, customer reviews are your best bet for selecting your next car, smartphone or restaurant because they will likely deliver an experience you expect.
Skeptics often cite that reviews from customers, who may not be like you, make the usefulness of these reviews highly questionable because people have very different attitudes and product adoption skills. While this is undisputable, the large number of reviews and filtering options available allow for a reasonably easy match between a shopper and the customer profiles. The personality and attitudes of a customer shine through the language of the reviews and help a shopper to “try on” an experience of people like her. The absence of a “story” is one of the key reasons why ecommerce sites that substitute actual reviews with score cards experience lower traffic and visit-to-purchase conversion rates than their competitors who publish complete reviews.
Most of content generated by customers is fact based. There is no sugar coating or attempts to manipulate your emotions. The language of reviews tend to be more specific, more matter-of-fact and focused on the personal experience the writer had with a product in question. Warm and fuzzy is much less effective when it faces meaningful competition from more “rational” sources.
The language also betrays fakers and dumb marketers who sometimes try to manipulate the market. Faking reviews effectively is not as easy as people may think. The language used, vague description of details and lack of personal experience knowledge are easily noticed not only by an attentive reader, but even by algorithmic filters that consistently give them low confidence score. In addition, it is impossible to tip the scale with an occasional fake review, and a sufficient volume of them can be easily spotted and tracked to the source. The financial penalties imposed by FTC for publishing fake reviews have run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that fades compared with damage to the reputation of the company that commission such activities.
It is surprising how few marketers consider customer reviews to be a valuable source for marketing intelligence because they cannot control and/or manipulate it. Instead they prefer to rely on “big data” acquired without customers’ consent and often against their wishes. Those marketers who do hear what real customers want to tell them quickly discover what specifically make one product more valuable than the alternatives to their best customers and prospects. Actual use of this intelligence to support their product marketing processes helps them consistently outsell their competitors by a wide margin without price discounting.
You cannot eliminate an uncertainty, but experiential information provided by customers helps to resolve it much faster and much more specifically than any brand advertising or company centered survey.
