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You know the situation: you're searching for a product and online reviews are staggering. "Wonderful device, works without a hitch, very sturdy even - I ordered another one for my kids! They were thrilled!" And so were their children's children, I guess. This and similar adulation pushed the product rating up to 4.8 out of 5 stars and now strongly motivates others to make the purchase. The system works because these are the opinions of real customers, real people like you and me. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
The marketing industry understood this sooner than any research team - we trust customer recommendations more than simple marketing slogans. It must be a frustrating experience for highly paid ad creators: they do their best to create great imagery, dreams and visions even when the product is just a toilet cleaner. Yet, we place more trust in friends, relatives or other customers that already own the product. What better way for companies to market their products than to create their own reviews and have them prominently featured on popular sites?
If you can believe the big retailers, they're doing everything in their power to end this practice. Various hurdles during registration (a simple email address is not enough), editorial reviews, review ratings by other customers - sounds quite safe and reliable, doesn't it? Yet, marketing adepts estimate at least 30% of the reviews to be fakes. How can small editorial teams scrutinize hundreds of thousands of reviews on a daily basis? If anything, they'll catch the most obvious and amateurish fakes at best. Most fakes are seldom as easy to spot as the many rave reviews published by a husband for his wife's books, each under a different name but all with the same spelling mistakes. Companies don't get their hands dirty, they have trained personnel for that.
Enter social media agencies. Just to be clear: most social media agencies are committed to legitimate marketing work but there are a few exceptions. Black sheep of the marketing industry that have also (unsuccessfully) contacted Ashampoo by the way. Good ratings for download portals, online stores or articles - if you have the money, you'll get it. They'll contract students, home workers or other native speakers that quickly change pseudonyms while singing the praises of selected products. For a fee, they'll also keep an eye on negative comments and either publish counterstatements or denigrate unfavorable comments with their replies. These people know what they're doing! They don't rely on prefabricated text blocks or copy and paste but create short, often inconspicuous and emotionally engaging stories devoid of glaring adulation or conceptional errors.
Sturdy, low battery consumption - a good cellphone!
So how can you avoid falling for the fakes? Here's what I do. First, I sort out portals that display favorable ratings for just about everything. Don't laugh, they exist, especially in the area of consumer electronics. You could pass off a brick as a cellphone there and still get a 9.3 out of 10 rating. Next, I discard products that have many positive reviews but with none of them containing any information on practical tests. If you buy something, you'll pick it up, use it, put it on or trim your hedges with it - and then you describe your experiences. Only when reviews contain something to that effect will they be relevant to me. Apart from that, some portals like Amazon offer the "Amazon Verified Purchase" seal. Theoretically, social media agencies could buy, write and return the products, in practice, this probably seldom happens. One more trust advantage. Pictures are equally trustworthy as they mean that somebody actually picked up the product.
Finally, here's what matters most to me: good, well founded negative reviews. They're the beacon of light in a gloomy landscape optimized for sales. Often garnished with some astonishment at all the positive reviews ("How can anyone give this faulty design a positive rating?"), they enable us to see the bleak reality. Bad firmware, cheap design, impractical details or poor construction - this is where the mask comes off. Some people truly deserve huge discounts or good karma! When I see well founded criticism, I pay particular attention to the review and it'll influence my buying decision. But you have to be careful here, too. "Shipment arrived 2 days late!", "Delivery man smelled like a beaver" or "Stepson dropped everything, can't rate it, 2 stars" doesn't count. Even if you make a wrong buying decision: if all else fails, you can always return the product - and write a well founded negative review to offer a glimpse of reality in an otherwise wild world of shopping.
What I would like to know: do you still trust customer reviews or do you frequently suspect surreptitious advertising?
Another trick Amazon use as I discovered when checking Grado headphones, is aggregating all scores for a particular manufacturer. I was suspicious when I found all Grado headphone models had exactly the same rating. This technique masks the poor reviews for certain models in a manufacturer's range and is very misleading.
Here's a tale ..on tainted text ..as writ by: Socrates in The Phaedrus (274)
The Egyptian God of The Liberal Arts , Theuth, presents his new technique to the king/god Thamus, with the words: "This Invention ....will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories ; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom I have discovered." The king berates him and and replies that on the contrary : "This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, for they will not practise their memory .... You have invented an elixir ...not of memory ..but of reminding ; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with."
You don't get owt for nowt - straight from the authors mouth ....
The problem is not complex. When most of what we buy is manufactured by what amounts to slave labor, probably in an overseas dictatorship, and no attention whatever is payed to quality control, the end result is all too often dysfunctional.
When we contact customer support we interact with tech support personnel in an overseas country with a large English-speaking population whose English is rudimentary. Greed on the part of multinational corporations with too many high-paying executive positions is the source of the problem.
This is by far the most amazing blog I have read. It's intelligent, amusing and better researched than the large hadron collider.
It's been a huge help to me - it reduces my workload, cleans my house and even polishes my shoes!!
I have recommended it to all my friends, and they love it too - so do their children!
(Sven, mum says don't be late for dinner tonight)
Greetings to granny, mom and my sis. :)
i read customer reviews only if I really am interested in purchasing the product. I also want more detail to make me at least think they actually used the product and wanted to share their opinions.
Just before the weekend Sven "You could pass off a brick as a cellphone.." :)
It's a blizzard of advertising every which way we turn. I say read the fine print before making a purchase. Do I need this product? Do I have the money to buy it or am I going to borrow the money via a credit card?
For me after many decades of purchasing I tend to stick closer to the corporate names I trust. A good return or replace guarantee is at the top of my list. Have a great weekend.
I do not trust customer reviews. You can almost read the falseness in the review. If all the reviews are positive then something is wrong because someone always has something to complain about. Right Captain Obvious?
Good article.
I also look for any negative user reviews, but I had occasion to write a negative but respectful review, after reading the very positive reviews - (no negative comments) - published on the website.
I checked the website some weeks later, and guess what? - my comments were not included; however, a few more positive comments had been added to the list, thus keeping the overall standard to a very high level.
My first port of call is Which Magazine to see if they have rated the item.
There is an old expression "caveat emptor". It is the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.
Reading reviews and word of mouth are fine but consider the source - and their inbuilt biases....including the negative review balance.
The art of selling someone something they do not want is my favorite definition of Marketing.
Any good Marketing course teaches the 6 P's i.e. product, price, place (distribution), promotion (e.g. advertising), people who are the central 'target' and performance (e.g. profitability and share) which is the ultimate objective.
To avoid becoming that target, do your research - preferably from sources that do not have a vested interest in selling you the product. Being well informed is crucial to showing you wether what you are being offered is really a "great product" or merely being pitched to make you think so.
'On the ball' once more Sven, you must have reviewed many reviews to produce this article.
'Too good to be true', it is most of the time, and I doubt that the majority of buyers write a review for an acceptable product.
I know a chap who studied TV advertising at university and make several comments when we meet relating to the nonsensical, low-grade, silly attempts at TV advertising. One comment from him was, "We were told by the instructor that ridiculous ads 'make people take notice, no matter how stupid is the ad.''
I disagreed and replied that in the real world where real people live, most TV advertising is increasingly repetitive and annoying, that they don't buy the products from the ad, and they mute the annoying sound with the 'wonderful' remote control.
Reviews of store layout and employees has been seen by me, SALES, SALES, SALES .... now it means a store full of goodies with reduced prices, when in fact 'Sales' are the reason for the store to be there in the first place, to SELL products, so when I see a store window full of SALE signs, to me it means the store 'Sells' products, whereas 'Reduced Prices' is more attention-grabbing, not seen on a regular basis.
I don't mind Ebay and the ratings only, 5 stars maximum, and a few words if the purchasers' desire to type a word or two of favour.
Good article but the penultimate word should have been surreptitious (by stealthy or improper means) not serendipitous (good outcome by accident)
Thank you, you’re absolutely right! I’ve corrected the error.
Amazon reviews, in particular, need to be scrutinized.
For a VERY long time, that list of mostly five star reviews directly under the product description had a phrase very similar to the following embedded somewhere within it:
"If you got benefit from my review, please rate it helpful. I was supplied this product for free or at a discount for my honest, unbiased review."
Right. Honest and unbiased, and all mostly five stars. A joke, really. I went out of my way to vote those "not helpful" at every opportunity. Apparently, others did too, because it seems now most of those reviews (although mostly still positive) are from Verified Buyers.
Another outfit to watch (although I think they've stopped doing it now) is Newegg, whose 'Eggspert' reviews are ALWAYS four or five stars, even for some real stinkers. I was an Eggspert reviewer for a while, but my number of three star reviews for mediocre products was perhaps too much, and they simply stopped sending me free product to look at.
Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware) was never more appropriate than it is right now. Know what you're looking at.
There is near zero sales and marketing integrity at this time. in our culture
The majority of customer reviews are bogus. And anyone that thinks that marketing and advertising agencies do not create fake reviews and illegitimate customer service bot is brain dead. For a big enough fee, or to retain a client they will do almost anything. Greed rules.
A very timely and useful article, as usual. I wholeheartedly agree with your comments on negative reviews. No product has ever gotten 100% good reviews honestly, with no bad reviews. Someone will be unsatisfied, even they are selling ten Euro notes for 2 Euros. The normal distribution of satisfaction should follow the statistical curve of one side of a bell curve, or something close to it. Another issue is the websites, trying to fish out the frauds, make you go through hoops to logon and leave a review. I've declined reporting many an issue with products I've purchased (that never should have been invented in the first place) because it was too much hassle to sign up, log in, verify, take a survey, enter a landline phone number, name all of my children and my siblings, report the gas mileage of my car, tell them how many times I shopped at their site in the last month, and calculate the square root of my mother-in-law's shoe size, all to tell them that I didn't like what I had received after I made my purchase.
I have found the best way to judge these reviews is to compare reviews on several websites when possible, and stick with vendors that I know and/or have dealt with in the past, and ones who let me return disappointing goods at their expense (or at a very nominal out-of-pocket expense). And word-of-mouth from friends is always best.
Having said all that, I'd like to mention that anything from Ashampoo is worthy of consideration. Of the dozens of programs I've gotten from you over the years, my only disappointments have been with titles that I tried to make into something that they were not designed for and were not advertised to perform, my own fault.
In the case of photographic kit, I read the reviews but it is difficult to determine what photographic skill level the reviewer is at and what they use the camera for. Most positive customer reviews, I find, are merely self-affirmation of them making a good decision. When it is a critical review then it is often about camera brand more than the camera itself: a Canon aficionado not liking a Nikon or vice-versa. A camera doesn't make a picture - the photographer's skills do that.
This whole fake review thing has gotten out of hand, and your observations are correct. One thing I do is look at the ratio of five star reviews vs 1 star reviews. If a product had 500 5-star reviews, but 200 1-star, I suspect I don't want the product.
However, 100% 5-star reviews are indicative of a site that requests 5-star reviews for some kind of benefit. I recently received an email from an Amazon vendor pleading for a good review to help his family expenses.
This happens more often on App Store purchases where the vendor will unlock features in return for a 5-star review.
However, to help people further, there are new websites that analyze Amazon reviews:
Fakespot.com, and Reviewmeta.com. On both sites, you copy and paste in the URL of the Amazon product you want to analyze.
Good article for the unwary, plenty of fake ratings out there especially on distraction sites!
I recently read about the amazing bargains that could be won at an online auction site - then I saw that the "editorial" was sponsored by, guess who? - yep, the auction company.
I usually start with a known brand and specification then check out the product and supplier with an independent search.