Ad-weary consumers and jaded millennials are no longer influenced by traditional television commercials, banner ads and yesterday’s in-your-face approach that was so popular on Madison Avenue, and marketers today are throwing every innovation they can think of into the marketing budget to find something that works. Today’s most effective advertisement is a non-advertisement, taking the form of a grass-roots, two-way dialog that takes place either between brand and consumer, or between the consumers themselves.
In this day of social media and instant communication, consumers rely more on each other for product information than they do big-budget television ads showing curiously-dressed hipsters drinking beer on a cruise ship. Marketers have gotten wise to this trend, and are now inserting themselves into those private conversations any way they can.
But the move from top-down “Buy This Now Because We’re Awesome!” advertising, to a more subtle form of two-way engagement with consumers, is fraught with difficulties. Consumers turn to things like social media discussions and user-generated reviews precisely because they don’t want the marketers to be part of the conversation. The problem there is that the reviews which purport to be from diligent consumers are often anonymous, contain no meaningful information and are often lean on details, and often posted by someone with an axe to grind rather than a genuine desire to share his or her personal experience with a product.
“The democratic nature of the Internet has changed marketing for good, and marketers are only just now beginning to realize that to get the most out of user-generated content, they have to relinquish control,” said Jeev Trika, CEO of CrowdReviews.com, a crowdsourced site for online reviews. “Consumers have always asked their friends and relatives about what they like and don’t like. The Internet has just expanded that friends-and-family referral into something much bigger.” But like so many things online, the nature of online reviews and social recommendations is today at a crossroads, said Trika. “The first generation of social reviews gave consumers a powerful, grass-roots alternative to Madison Avenue, but the anonymity of the Internet has allowed a new level of distrust and irrelevancy to creep into those online reviews. User reviews must undergo a serious change for consumers to get real value from them.”
To continue to be relevant, user reviews have to overcome four troublesome issues, according to Trika:
- The trust issue. In addition to the inability to trust anonymous reviews, the review sites themselves are often thinly-disguised affiliate sites that earn commissions when a user clicks on a product.
- Thin content. User-generated review sites eventually lose relevance with contributors offering banal and meaningless one-line reviews such as “I didn’t like it,” or “I thought it was okay.”
- Anonymity. A consumer may choose to trust or not trust a television advertisement, but at least they know where it comes from. A recommendation from a friend also carries that benefit of familiarity, but too frequently, online reviews are completely anonymous or are posted with a pseudonym.
- Astroturfing. Unscrupulous marketers, cloaked in anonymity, have taken to buying fake positive reviews, or placing fake negative reviews of their competitors.
What can marketers do now? Clearly there’s a need to go beyond traditional banner ads and television commercials. A user review strategy is taking it in the right direction by changing the top-down model to a two-way conversation, but the industry too quickly took the easy way out with spammy review sites, thin content and paid reviews from shills found on sites like Fiverr, and it didn’t work. The focus now has to be on curated reviews, no anonymous reviewers, and legitimate review platforms that aren’t just SEO and affiliate sites making money from the highest bidder. Marketers and ad agencies used to being in control of the conversation need to be able to let go of that control, and let the consumers have a free hand in the discussion.
What can consumers do? Consumers are hungry for meaningful and personal product information, but not all review sites provide that. To get the real experience, consumers need to distinguish between anonymous reviews, and realize that those review sites that allow users to hide behind a cloak of anonymity are less credible than they claim to be. Find the review sites that adhere to a higher set of standards, and give more weight to meaningful reviews by consumers who have taken the time to verify their identity before posting. And finally, when a product has a hundred five-star reviews, all of which are brief and generic and say nothing specific about the product, realize that the five-star rating is probably meaningless. If that’s the case, it’s time to move on to another review site.