Itamar Simonson

The authors argue that marketers are losing power, albeit not across the board, when consumers have ready access to professional and nonprofessional reviews. Tidbits I thought were interesting: when we search for information, we tend to value that information more because we’ve searched for it—that makes it feel more relevant/worth basing a decision on than if it had been handed to us. In other words, “people infer from their own behavior that, if they looked or waited for that information, they must value it and should now take advantage of it,” which is a neat application of the concept that we tend to explain our own acts to ourselves as well-motivated. Also, the authors argue that big brands lose some of their comparative advantage in an information-saturated world: brands provide you with a good concept of what to expect from the next iteration, but if you have a good source of reviews, you can get the same predictability from an unfamiliar product/service. For the consumers with access to reviews and in categories that are well-reviewed, then, it will be harder for producers to control the framing of their products/services because reviews will help set expectations. This mitigates the ability of the seller to, for example, push you to a more expensive version by showing you the “cheap” one, the “middle” one, and the “expensive” one—in traditional framing, showing the “expensive” one leads more people to choose the “middle” one as a bargain/compromise, but the authors’ research suggests that access to Amazon-style reviews negates that effect.

I also liked the point that reviews are about finding good or bad fit—a bad review by someone who doesn’t share your tastes can actually make you more likely to want a product. In fact the authors found “that if you see someone disliking a product for reasons that do not apply to you (the reviewer criticizes the camera’s manual override capabilities, but you have no intention of using the manual override feature anyway and are content to keep it on auto), you will often evaluate the product more favorably than if you had not been exposed to that review.” This is a good indication that, as the authors concede, they aren’t claiming that internet-savvy consumers will be more rational in the usual sense of that term—instead review-users will behave differently than marketers have been taught to expect.… (mere)