Why Peer-to-Peer Product Reviews Are Gaining Ground ( Find Out Where & How Brands Can Monitor Them)

The influencer marketing industry is at its cornerstone of starting loosing credibility. For a while now, it’s been like a bubble that has grown in one year like others in ten. But now it has reached a point where many of the followers have started questioning the authenticity of the brand promoters whose online presence and actions they are scrutinizing every day.

Influencers don’t always walk the talk!

Hence, their product reviews and recommendations are losing trust. Living by different standards than they are preaching across social media platforms does not remain unnoticed nor little penalized by their followers. When that happens, it happens for good! 

Just the other day, while doing research for our work at FeedCheck, I came across a number of comments on the Instagram page of a celebrity influencer woman discussing how one photo she posted was contrary to what she had used to preach about wearing natural and less makeup. Her followers found that very sad and expressed their disappointment that they had been admiring someone who seemed to be a different person than the one they had got to know.

This is just the beginning of realizing that paid celebrity influencers do not always live according to their sayings which are mostly dictated by the PR people behind the brands they are promoting and serially posted by a number of contracted influencers while aiming for looking credible.

This is paid work and it’s hard to assess its objectivity. And to be clear, it’s not about wearing natural makeup or not! It’s about recommendations coming from influencers who do not stick to their preaches and show parallel or opposite behaviours, thus generating mistrust, doubts and disbelief among their followers. Hence, brands are also affected due to followers’ hesitations and reorientation towards other places where they seek authentic opinions about the products and brands they want to buy from.

“When in doubt, call a friend!”…as the saying goes. 

In the friend role here are all our peers who have nothing to gain nor to loose from sharing their own real experiences using different products.  And what’s the best place for that than the eCommerce platforms and reviews sites. This is a new media growing space that is catching the attention of more and more consumer goods brands.

Henry Giddins jr., the Head of Insights for global colour cosmetics at Coty is also pointing out to the massive shift in terms of trust from paid celebrity influencers to peer-to-peer product reviews whose recommendations bring a level of objectivity to consumers.

Like Coty, there are many other brands that are courageously seeking alternative solutions to the typical paid influencer campaigns. They are looking for creating product discovery and understanding the impact and perception of their brands among their consumers from eCommerce product reviews.

But how to get review data in a way in which brands can make sense of it?!

With various and different consumer preferences across the globe which also require different product lines in different countries, brands need to hear and discover their own products through the experiences of their local consumers.

There is where FeedCheck comes in and helps brands aggregate and monitor their product reviews not only across globally known eCommerce platforms like Amazon but also in markets from Eastern Europe and Russia to Turkey, UAE, Qatar to South Africa, India and China.

This infographic below shows where brands should look at when they decide to hear their consumer product reviews and discover what their products are appreciated for and what they need to improve:

With all product reviews aggregated in one place and continuously monitoring them, brands never loose sight of their customer voice in any of their markets. Thus, they get timely data about their customer sentiment around key product features and topics referenced in their reviews over time. They also benefit of discovering which of their products in their portfolio performs best in which markets as well as by comparison with their competitors.

Review monitoring with FeedCheck is an ongoing daily process that brings brands all their product reviews classified by their average ratings for each of their product at depth and breadth levels.

If you are considering including your product review monitoring into your strategy tactics, we would love to start our discussion and see how FeedCheck can do this work for you!