Forget stars and numeric ratings: a review's language offers better clues to a product's quality and likely success
Through computational analysis of hundreds of thousands of online reviews, the researchers discovered that positive star and numerical ratings didn’t reliably correlate with how well products and businesses ultimately fared
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Ever had a great meal at a restaurant rated four out of five stars, but then had a lackluster meal at another restaurant with the exact same rating?
If so, you might have fallen victim to what Kellogg School researchers have dubbed “the positivity problem”: the vast majority of online reviews are positive, but those favorable reviews don’t always translate to real-world quality. “You can have two products with four-and-a-half stars, but they’re not equally good, nor are they equally successful in the marketplace,” explains Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at Kellogg.
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]