Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

How do you buy a bed? Or a sofa? Or select a hotel or cab company in a city you have never visited? Such occasional or first time purchases require some thought and research. The item may be expensive. Or it may be that you have invested time – your precious vacation days – in a choice and want your vacation to go smoothly.

Digital platforms ought to provide a solution. It is so easy to post a review online. And there is no doubt that sites like TripAdvisor can be influential. That's evidenced by the fact that hotels fine guests for posting poor reviews.

That's an example of gaming the system in itself. If you are trying to bias the sample of reviews then you are corrupting the system. If I ran TripAdvisor I would clamp down on this and not allow reviews – or perhaps even bookings – for hotels with this policy. 

But this is not the worst gaming of the system that goes on. People buy fake five star reviews for their own company and fake zero or one star reviews for their competitors. PBS exposed the practice a short while ago.

The deception involved is blatant:

MAN: I have not been to Miami, but I would certainly take a review from Miami, yes.

JACKIE JUDD: What would you say?

MAN: I would say, Clipboard Cab Company was very prompt in their service. They arrived exactly at 7:00 at the airport, when I had asked them to arrive. I found the driver very, very pleasant and cooperative, and I was very satisfied with the service. I will definitely use it again next time I’m in Miami.

A friend pointed out to me the reviews on a moving company in New York last year. One was extremely negative speaking unreliability and lost and broken items. Below was a response from the company saying that an identically worded review had been submitted for all but one of the companies in the local market. We are entitled to be suspicious as to who was responsible here. 

There are signs we can look for. Fake reviews are almost always five star or zero/one star. Mixed comments are much more likely to be genuine. But if we discount the best and the worst reviews then fake reviewers will start submitting two and four star reviews instead.

While Amazon actively seeks reviews for products that it knows I have actually bought, it does not seem to prevent me writing reviews for products which I have not purchased. (I didn't follow through and write a review, though, so there may be some later cut off). 

The only sensible advice is to read reviews sensibly and try to pick out the generic boilerplate reviews. But what else would one write about a cab company, other than that which was covered above? Even a genuine review is going to seem generic.