Startups

You Don’t Want A 5-Star Review

Comment

Image Credits: Phoenixns (opens in a new window) / Shutterstock (opens in a new window)

Tom Collinger

Contributor

Tom Collinger is the executive director of Northwestern’s Spiegel Research Center.

Brands know that customer reviews play an integral role in consumers’ purchasing decisions, especially online. As such, they work hard to drive the highest ratings they can. And yet, it’s the presence of less-than-five-star reviews that can actually be what drives purchase.

Recent data analysis across 40 product categories looked at the impact of reading reviews on purchases. Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews found that, in moderation, bad reviews actually help boost sales.

In fact, product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5, according to research from GetApp. Products with five-star ratings were less influenced, likely due to today’s skeptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities. Having a few less-than-perfect reviews decreases a product’s average star rating, but grows the business more.

Why are five-star reviews too good to be true?  We think it’s authenticity.

There’s a healthy cynic in us all. We know nothing is perfect. So when a consumer sees only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off.

They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as “perfect.” And as Amazon recently filed a lawsuit against more than 1,000 sellers of fake four- and five-star reviews, consumers are scrutinizing reviews more closely than ever before — and have reason to do so.

Healthy skepticism is growing for advertising, journalism and, so too, for perfect product reviews. A mix of good and bad reviews demonstrates a brand’s transparency, and may well signal that the reviews displayed on your website are not fake or filtered. In fact, some shoppers might go so far as to ignore brands or products with only five-star reviews and look for a more genuine alternative.

While it’s important to include a mix of star ratings, it doesn’t mean brands shouldn’t emphasize top reviews. Consider the following practices:

Offer (and test) options

Offer several options for reading reviews, from highest to lowest star rating or by ranking those as most “helpful.” This same strategy can be used for product offerings, your blog and other content. Include several options for current and potential customers to find the information they seek; customers are always receptive to a more personalized experience.

Value the content

The content of the reviews is another influencer of purchase behavior. When consumers read the review to find out why the product received a specific rating, what may appear to be a negative review can prompt a purchase.

For example, if a product has a four-star rating instead of five because the reviewer thinks it’s “not the right shade of red,” it may be just the message to prompt another purchaser to buy.

Keep negative reviews and pay attention

Eighty-two percent of consumers specifically seek negative feedback, so it should be made available to customers. As our research reflects, maximizing the value of customer reviews to drive purchases demands the presence of less-than-five-star reviews. Also, while brands seek ways to improve their product or service offering, fewer than five stars provides authentic and valuable insight to make strategic improvements.

Our research revealed that, in some categories, reading a review can not only have an impact on purchase, but a dramatic one. So, to make consumer reviews matter most to consumers, it’s important to encourage all reviews, avoid hiding negative ones, offer customers the opportunity to expand on their reviews and act on customer reviews based on specific feedback.

The consumer is expecting the brands they choose to not just offer a great product, but to listen, respond and, per our research, stay authentic.

More TechCrunch

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools