User

We have spent a lot of time talking about the underutilization of reviews. That they’re primarily utilized to help bottom-of-funnel customers evaluate/validate purchase decisions and that they’re growing in importance in other areas of the funnel.

One of the pieces we’ve failed to talk about, though, is how the end user begins to shift as you begin utilizing reviews in those different fashions. While consumers are the primary beneficiary of traditional PDP-located reviews, that beneficiary label ends up getting shared with the brand/marketer as you expand the surface area for reviews. And that’s mostly because the application is different.

While reviews in this “new structure” are still content getting served to consumers, they are not pure-play reviews; they become inputs to the content and those inputs need to be synthesized by the marketer/brand. This, as we’ve discussed, is already happening with ChatGPT and some marketers, but we believe that’s going to continue changing and adoption will accelerate. And, when that happens, the primary benefit of a review isn’t so much helping a single customer as much as it’s creating business intelligence for a brand to help a multitude of customers by better positioning, better messaging and better product improvements/expansion.

When that happens, the primary beneficiary of reviews flips from the consumer to the marketer/brand, because the insights accumulated become inputs that make multiple surface areas of the business better, not just a purchase decision.

Because of the distributed nature of these benefits, the measurement of such implementations isn’t as straightforward as “customers who engaged with reviews versus customers who didn’t,” other proxies for review effectiveness, or even A/B testing whether to show reviews. What you’d expect, though, is that you’d end up with the right inputs to improve each surface area where the business intelligence is being applied. That might be ads, that might be website copy, that might be inspiration for product expansion or product improvement.

In each case, though, it’s the marketer/brand with more information to make better decisions. And that will make them the main user.