Business Quests in the Information Age: Figures of the day: the impact of product reviews

October 2008

Entrepreneurs On Business Quests

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Nicolas Martignole
Nicolas is a passionate technologist and an explorer of new ways and usages of technology. I like his no-nonsense way of approaching topics and definitely enjoyed learning and working with him at a scrum training.
sandrine Plasseraud
Great new marketing evangelist in the UK.
Hans Rosling
Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. I "discovered" him at a conference in Paris and found his quest for a fact-based understanding and analysis of the world most appealing.
Sylvain Zimmer
A young talented wiz kid who has been on a couple of business quests in the past five years... and he's in his early twenties!
Laurent Kratz
A serial entrepreneur currently very focused on the music industry.
Emmanuel Vivier
One of the top evangelists of new marketing methods in Europe: buzz, wom, viral & more.
Pascal Leurquin
Chef d'entreprise belge de 44 ans, marié, 3 enfants.

According to the February 2008 issue of Entrepreneur magazine "product reviews play a big role in consumers' decisions on what to buy" and the piece goes on to provide the following figures:

62% of consumers read consumer-written product reviews online
over 80% say their purchase decisions have been influenced by reviews
70% of shoppers share product reviews with their friends, family or colleagues

My take is that this is nothing new: consumers have always been sharing good tips, but owing to the Internet this is only beginning to emerge as a quantifiable phenomenon that attracts the attention of marketeers who are facing the impossible task of capturing human attention in an ever more cluttered media landscape. The interesting question though is this: aside from facilitating consumer expression can marketing pros whether working for advertisers or for agencies exploit the phenomenon to make the brands they serve more successful? And as a corollary I wonder whether the value lies in the technology that facilitates the recommendations or in the human interactions that can help understand better and record a large set of subjective experiences with a given product.