"The credibility of the reviewer is surprisingly unimportant"...

4 replies
Found this article at a website cited by the good doctor Vile in another thread.

How Customers Read Reviews: Four takeaways for marketers from a business school study | MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Offers some enlightening info from a study of how people use online reviews, published originally in Journal of Business Research.

Most surprising to me was "When researching the ways that customers process customer ratings, Filieri found that the credibility of the person writing the review was surprisingly unimportant. Even anonymous reviews seemed to carry a similar amount of weight as credited reviews. We shouldn't always feel the need to prioritize reviews from well-known or highly credible sources if we have a stronger, punchier review available from a lesser-known source."

That's valuable info for copywriters -- if it's true. Has anyone else come across any info that corroborates such a finding?

I've always read that anonymous testimonials were worth far less than those with names and pics. And I think it's common sense that testimonials from experts or celebrity endorsers carry more weight than those from nobodies.

What do you think of the study's findings? The article doesn't say much about sample size or methodology... Nor does the study's abstract...
  • Profile picture of the author jessegilbert
    Banned
    That sounds like utter b.s, to me. Personal experience has told the exact opposite.
    some testimonials are better than others, and some testimonials are better than no testimonials...
    but let's not kid ourselves here; human pyschology is herd like and if a top leader endorses something as great, the masses will more likely to buy it.
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  • Profile picture of the author jessegilbert
    Banned
    for amazon, which it appears that report was based on, maybe. If you have 100 amazon reviews and 5 famous names are there on the screen that people don't browse to in detail then yeah, it wouldn't matter.

    I know because I personally look for number of reviews and start and don't browse all reviews, just maybe 5 or so relevant ones. The more there are, the more you can be secure that it is a good purchase and use of time.

    But if the main part of the book and endorsements has well known names
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    • Profile picture of the author obaynes
      Interesting article but it would be great to have more detailed information on exactly what customers were "quickly scanning" for.

      My guess would be the most successful reviews very quickly answered the specific question the customer had in mind about the product - i.e., they're browsing low-priced blenders on Amazon, and they're scanning for reviews that mention the blender didn't melt after making smoothies with frozen fruit every day for eight weeks straight, or that the blades managed to chop their avocado, or etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author esmarshall
    all i took from this article is, you can acquire a high title and study at an established institute of higher learning and still not have a clue what your talking about

    and at the same time, it was a pretty vague explanation of the test conducted and pretty inconclusive
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