Are Online Customer Reviews Amazon’s Secret Sauce?

While Amazon often gets credit for its low prices, extensive selection, and speedy delivery, a new holiday ad campaign starring actor Adam Driver highlights the benefits Amazon’s five-star customer reviews add to the shopping experience.

Driver, described as a “real serious actor,” reimagines memorable reviews in the style of a one-man show. In the initial three videos, the acclaimed actor, best known for his roles in the “Star Wars” franchise and the HBO series “Girls,” reads real-life reviews left by Amazon customers, including ones dedicated to a plush seal, a Dutch oven, and — in a minute-plus ad — a banana slicer that has found viral success over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4F8xGgrf4E

“What these reviews have shown us is that some of our best writers are our customers, and we love how this campaign brings them into the spotlight,” said Jo Shoesmith, Amazon’s global chief creative officer, in a statement.

David Cohen wrote for Adweek, “Funny reviews on Amazon have developed a cult following of sorts, and even spawned their own community on Reddit, so the e-commerce giant decided to hop on the bandwagon, with help from a two-time Academy Award-nominated actor.”

The ads are running across social media and online platforms through Dec. 2. Amazon is also running a broader sentimental Christmas ad featuring a theater manager’s hidden vocal talent being discovered to the 1960s hit, “What The World Needs Now."

Amazon also ran ads featuring direct quotes from a review during the 2023 holiday season. The hero spot, “Tent,” spotlighted a pregnant mother who, in an attempt to create peace between her two young sons, buys them tents on Amazon. The ad also features her actual review: “Bought a tent for their beds ... Gave them a new world.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been credited with pioneering online customer reviews. Founded as an online bookseller, Amazon was able to offer a larger selection of books than any local bookstore but crowdsourced customer reviews to make up for the recommendations customers received from bookstore employees. The move was seen as controversial at the time because Amazon declined to hide negative reviews.

Bezos reportedly said, “When we pioneered customer reviews, it was incredibly controversial. I got letters from publishers saying, ‘You don’t understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Take down those negative customer reviews.’ We’ve never done anything of real value that wasn’t at least a little bit controversial when we did it. But if you want to be a pioneer, you have to be comfortable being misunderstood.”

Studies have since shown that negative reviews give credibility to positive reviews and bolster confidence in purchasing decisions.

However, the worth of user-generated reviews is still often questioned. Kenji ROI estimates that an average of only 1% to 2% of purchases on Amazon lead to a review. Fake online reviews are also found to be fairly common as well as hard to detect and remove.

A recent survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers from Reputation, a customer-feedback platform, found 53% of respondents expressing fear that AI could compromise the trustworthiness of online reviews. However, 77% of respondents still stated that they find online reviews to be “mostly” trustworthy. Also, 54% put their trust in online reviews first to guide their purchasing decisions, outweighing the opinions of friends and family (24%), company claims (18%), social media influencers (2%), and media reviews (2%).