There’s a reason testimonial sites are so popular because no one wants to waste their hard-earned money on crappy products, or spend money on a tasteless meal. That’s why we use the experiences of others on such sites and try to find out whether a certain review is authentic and reliable.
Linguist Anne Kronrod, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at Lowell State University in Massachusetts, analyzed the reviews and was able to discover certain patterns and draw conclusions.
Signs of fake reviews
How can you tell if a review you’re reading is honest?
Competition sometimes prompts businesses to pay people to write positive reviews for their products or negative reviews for competitors. Bots can also produce fake reviews that sound like they were written by humans.
That’s why fake reviews have become a huge problem that threatens to completely delegitimize online reviews. For example, a recent study estimated that fake reviews cause consumers to spend 12 cents more for every dollar spent.
The reality is that people are pretty bad at distinguishing a fake review from a real one. Basically, it’s like flipping a coin – studies have shown that customers can only correctly identify a fake review half of the time.
The researchers also tried to identify what characterizes a fake review. They suggested those that are too long or too short, in addition to those that do not use the past tense or the first person pronoun.
Administrators of review sites have long been aware of this problem. That’s why companies have developed an algorithm that identifies and filters out “useless” reviews – usually too short.
Consensus in reviews is not a complete guarantee of product quality
It’s important to think about the difference between writing a review yourself after trying a product or if you wrote it from memory.
In a study from 2023, prof. Kronrod and her colleagues pointed out that the main difference lies in whether a particular language is used. For example, a true overview will contain words that are more specific and describe the “what, where, when” of the experience.
In contrast, if someone has not actually stayed at, say, the hotel they are reviewing, or dined at the restaurant they are writing about, they will use abstract generalities that are loosely connected to the experience.
It’s a difference that’s easy to see from reading. For example: “The room was clean and the beach was nice”, or “The room was so clean, like new. The sandy beach was a few steps away, which allowed us to swim to our heart’s content. We had a wonderful view from the window of the sparkling sea water.”
Even real reviews can mislead us
Even if all fake reviews are filtered out, do product reviews still help you make better decisions?
As is often the case in marketing research, it depends.
Researchers have been looking into this issue for years and can point to various review features that can help you make decisions.
For example, you might assume that if you read several reviews for a product and they are similar to each other, that means there is a consensus about the product. Indeed, studies have shown that similarity in opinion is more likely to make readers more confident in their decision-making.
Research conducted by prof. Kronrod shows that similar reviews increase consumer confidence about the product. However, it also found that these similar reviews were more likely to be written by consumers who were less confident about their experience with the product. They probably simply repeated what others said in their reviews, following suit.
This creates a paradox. Readers of reviews that sound similar will be more confident that they made the right decision, even if the writers of the same reviews were less sure. At the same time, reviews that differ from each other will cause indecision among readers, even though the review writers were more confident about their experiences.
Text is not the only element that influences readers. During the research, it was discovered that the sheer number of reviews available on the platform can affect how we perceive each individual review.
So if you’re reading a review and it’s one of, say, 1,572 reviews, you’re going to think it’s a more credible review than if that same review was one of, say, 72.
This may seem illogical, but it can be explained by the human tendency to take quantity as a sign of quality: if a product has many reviews, it may mean that it is popular and many people have bought it. A halo effect occurs, and you then subconsciously believe that everything about the product – including its reviews – is better.
But for the most part, despite these and other issues, consumers still make better purchasing decisions with reviews than without.
It’s just a question of what to pay attention to.
Source: www.sitoireseto.com
