From vacation spots to coffee shops and even entertainment platforms like the best online casino Singapore, chances are you have not made many financial decisions without first checking the reviews.
Looking into the reputation of a product or service is nothing new. The oldest known customer complaint goes back to 1750 BC, when a customer named Nanni criticized the quality of copper ingots and the treatment of his servant during a deal with the merchant Ea-nāṣir. He complained about the poor deal, and Nanni asked for a refund.
With the internet making communication faster and easier than ever, reviews have become an important decision-making tool for buyers. Also, reviews became a key way for businesses to track and maintain their reputation.
So, let’s check the psychology and science behind online reviews, as well as their business impact.
The Psychology Behind Review Dependence
Nanni had his servant on the spot to check the copper quality and service. However, online shoppers today can’t see or test the product in person.
As we cannot feel the material of a sweater that looks good in the photo or taste the food that is marketed as mind-bogglingly tasty, we look for more information. We rely on details beyond appearances and descriptions to guide our choices. Reviews bridge these gaps and give us the closest thing to experiencing the product ourselves.
However, there is more to reviews than just information seeking. When we see hundreds of people raving about a product, we think that maybe all of them can’t be wrong. This method is called social proof. It is the same mental shortcut that makes us feel more confident about a restaurant when we see a line of people waiting outside.
Reviews also solve another one of our problems, called the paradox of choice. With too many options available, our brains become tired and unable to filter out information. This makes us more frustrated with 50 options than with only 5.
With reviews, we save time on checking each product and see what people before us went for.
The Four Stages of Review Influence
Recent research shows there are four stages of review influence, and we’ll cover them right now.
1. Creation
First up is what researchers call the creation stage, or what makes people write reviews in the first place.
Research on reviewer behavior shows that we usually hear more about very good or very bad experiences, since people with average ones rarely leave a review. This means we often miss out on what the typical experience is, since reviews can distort our perspective.
Companies are aware of this, so they send follow-up emails or messages, often adding small incentives to encourage reviews.
2. Engagement
The engagement stage is all about how you come across the reviews. Some review sites or retailers will have the most recent reviews shown first, while others will have the highest-rated reviews in the spotlight. At this stage, we check if the reviews are verified, if they seem fake, and whether sellers can respond to them. While it seems random, all these differences affect our trust in what we’re reading.
3. Impact
In the impact stage, reviews exercise their real economic power. Apart from your individual purchase, they can affect so many other factors, including search rankings, stock prices, or company practices.
In fact, review management is a very serious practice in marketing, with specialized software and large customer support teams. This goes so far that companies sometimes invest more in managing reviews than actually improving their product.
4. Insights
In the final insight stage, companies analyze review data to understand customer satisfaction, product design issues, and broader trends. This process allows reviews to influence the development of future products and services, while companies stay alert for promising opportunities.
The Dark Side of Review Culture
As expected, the power of reviews also carries certain downsides. Fake reviews, review bombing, and toxic company practices are some of the most common issues, each with a complex reason behind it and not likely to stop any time soon.
Fake reviews are the first issue that comes to mind, as it’s become easy to generate them in seconds. However, the industry is more sophisticated than it seems. It includes paid reviewers, subtle AI-generated reviews, and elaborate schemes designed to steer public opinion on a product.
Another concern is review bombing, in which individuals flood an establishment with one-star reviews for reasons unrelated to the quality of the service.
The pressure to keep the rating high can create toxic dynamics between customers and businesses. Some businesses have been caught giving discounts for good reviews or threatening customers who post bad ones.
Meanwhile, customers may use the threat of a bad review as leverage for making unreasonable demands.
Reviews Will Continue to Shape Everything: Perhaps Even More
Online reviews gave consumers greater power to influence businesses and their practices. Yet, this power also left us more vulnerable to manipulation and bias.
So, we learn to read reviews more carefully. We learn to spot the fakes, learn about biases that shape what gets reviewed, and remember that most reviews are driven by extreme experiences, pleasant or not.
For businesses, they will have to focus more on customer experience and product quality, as genuine reviews gain importance in contrast to AI or paid commentary. Hopefully, Ea-nāṣir did the same with his copper ingots.
