Everywhere

We have talked a lot about the fact that reviews are going to be everywhere. Not in terms of websites or anything like that—they’re already there—but everywhere in the funnel.

This is happening quickly, though, and the funnel is a pretty big, pretty nebulous thing. So, maybe a model for thinking about this is where parts of the funnel happen today. If you were to map to consumer interaction points, it probably looks (roughly) like this:

• Awareness

  • Advertising

  • Word of mouth (both IRL and online)

  • ChatGPT

  • Retail Distribution

• Consideration

  • Social media

    • Instagram

    • Facebook

    • TikTok

    • Etc

  • Research

    • ChatGPT

    • Reddit

    • Search

    • Word of mouth

  • Brand website

    • Product Listing Page

    • Product Detail Page

• Conversion

  • Brand website

  • Retail

  • ChatGPT (not yet, but soon?)

Reviews, today, sit in basically two places:

1. As close to the point of conversion as possible without interfering with it (the product detail page)

2. All the way at the top of the funnel in awareness (word of mouth is pretty much a review; if you tell someone about something you like, you’re both introducing them to the product and offering a positive review of it)

Everything else? They’re fairly open spaces for reviews.

As an example:

Brands, though, have leaned into user-generated content in nearly all those spaces, encouraging and rewarding photosharing on Instagram, partnering with influencers to push their products in videos, and paying affiliate fees to blogs for steering traffic their way. If you squint, you can see a review inside all of these.

As brands begin shifting some of their strategies from ranking highly on Google to showing up more frequently in LLM answers, though, photo dumps and “empty” endorsements won’t be enough to feed the content beast of ChatGPT. It will need more context.

Brands, then, will look for those customers and creators to provide it.

Customers, of course, will handle that on their own. They already do. But creators will need to know what the overlap is between what their audience likes and what a brand’s customers like, so that the context can be specific and helpful. Where might you get that information?

The obvious—and most robust source of this data—is your reviews.

Today, it lives in two places. Soon, it (and by-products from analysis of it) will live everywhere.