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Don’t Fear the Customer
December 6, 2007

As a follow-up to a previous post, we find that eMarketer gives online marketers good reason to not fear their own customers: most customer reviews are actually positive. In a Bazaarvoice survey of online customer reviews, 87% of online reviews were deemed “positive,” with 51% “positive most times” and 36% “positive every time.” Only 2% of online reveiws were deemed “negative,” either every time or most times.

The survey also found that:

Consumers generally had good intentions when writing reviews. Nine out of 10 respondents said they wrote reviews in order to help others make better buying decisions. Nearly 80% wrote reviews in order to reward a company.

This should give heart to those companies who are worried about online consumers being overly critical or spiteful. And after all, consumers themselves, research has found, are increasingly looking to other customer reviews for guidance.

Avoiding any customer reviews may at some point be a subtle bad review in and of itself. After all, when movie studios deliberately avoid critic screenings, it generally means it’s a wretched movie.  Might not the same someday be said of products or companies that shun customer reviews?

Posted by Richard Romano on December 6, 2007 | Comments (0)