The key findings from my research and that of my colleagues on what makes consumer reviews so influential in influencing consumer choice are summarized below.
Due to the importance of reviews, marketers, social media influencers, and software developers are keen to know the qualities that make them persuasive and compelling. It’s important that you, as a customer, also understand what makes them effective and convincing.
In a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Jennifer Escalas, Stephan Ludwig, Ellis van den Hende, and I argue that persuasiveness lies in the experience of “transportation”. The level of this transportation depends on the degree and power of the narrative offered.
We believed that reviews were essentially short stories and that they could contain the same elements as a novel. We developed a computerized method for assessing the “narrativity” of a text to test this theory. Then, we conducted three studies.
Who, Where, and When to Show
First, we analyzed nearly 200,000 reviews on the TripAdvisor travel review site. The computerized method we used showed the relationship between the words and phrases that were used in the reviews as well as the reader ratings.
The more a review revealed the writer’s mindset, the better it was. Here is an example of a check for Ka, a Las Vegas circus show:
There was lots of action. This is what I like about this show. I would definitely go back to see it.
A sense of place and the sequence of events also contributed to a greater level of helpfulness. This is an example of a review for the musical Vegas! The Show:
The first half seemed to drag until the bird trainer appeared with his friends. They were funny, and their performance added life to the show. The second half was great fun!
Not linear narratives but emotional curves
Our computerized technique also allowed us to count the number of positive and negative words in each review and their location. This analysis examined the impact of the emotional threads in the stories.
The reviews that showed emotional curves, such as moving from positives to negatives and back, were considered more useful than those with a linear narrative. The following is a review of Mystery Adventures in Las Vegas, a role-playing live-action game:
It is a very unusual activity to do in Las Vegas, but it can be a great change of pace. Max was a bit nervous at first, with lots of “uhhh” s and “ummmmms,” but warmed quickly. It was a great experience and well worth our effort.
Reviews that begin with the most dramatic or important revelation are more useful. An example is the following introduction of a Graceland Wedding Chapel Review:
I was very disappointed that I didn’t get married in Graceland Chapel. We were …. on our wedding night!
In the second study, panelists from Amazon Mechanical Turk (a crowdsourcing platform) were asked to evaluate the helpfulness and transportation of selected reviews. In our third study, 156 students were asked to read reviews of a trip in Agra, India. The participants were again asked to rate the reviews on how helpful and transporting they were. They were also asked how much the reviews made them want to visit Agra.
In these two studies, we confirmed that the more narrative elements present in the reviews, the more they were considered captivating and persuasive. We found that the best reviews are those which tell what happened, where it occurred, and why. They also have emotional transitions, and their climaxes, at the start.
