Consumers may enjoy reading funny or sarcastic product reviews online, but do they influence their purchasing decisions?
That is the query of my colleagues Susan Mudambi, David Schuff, Ermira Zifla and I desired to respond with our recent Research on “pseudo-reviews”.” By this, I don't mean fake reviews which might be designed to mislead consumers. Pseudo-reviews, which could possibly be written by anyone, usually tend to entertain or wink on the reader and infrequently say something true concerning the product.
We have found that the reply to this query is yes, but not entirely unequivocally. The quirky nature of those reviews captivates consumers and piques their interest within the product. An actual-life example of this was in 2009, when hundreds of reviews were posted on Amazon.com for a T-shirt with an image of three wolves howl on the moonThe humorous, exaggerated and clearly fabricated reviews went viral and the T-shirt became one in all the best-selling items in Amazon's clothing range.
However, we’ve found that humorous reviews also increase consumers' uncertainty about whether the product is suitable for them and due to this fact make them less willing to purchase it.
We reached our conclusions after conducting two separate online experiments by which we asked about 450 participants to read a series of product reviews based on real Amazon reviews. Some of those were authentic, others were modified to sound funny or sarcastic, and there have been positive and negative examples of every. We then asked participants about their level of amusement, uncertainty concerning the product, and likelihood that they might buy the product.
We found that a humorous review increases a client's sense of amusement and makes them more prone to purchase a product than in the event that they had read a real and more serious review. We also found that a funny review can have the other effect by increasing consumer uncertainty, for instance when the product is a posh item like a flat-screen TV.
In other words, it's likely that pseudo-reviews can increase sales by adding entertainment value in certain situations, reminiscent of impulse purchases. But they will hurt sales when a product requires a more detailed evaluation and the humorous reviews confuse relatively than inform potential buyers.
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