Under the Influence: Fake Reviews and Consumer Behaviour
Rocio Concha Galguera
Director of Policy and Advocacy & Chief Economist at Which? | NED Ada Lovelace Institute | NED Consumer International | NED BEUC
New research from Which? shows for the first time how fake reviews can create harm by misleading people into purchasing poor-quality products.
For 18 months now, Which? has been talking about fake reviews and why they’re a problem. Fake reviews deliberately manipulate shoppers’ choices, obscuring the real facts about a product or service they’re buying. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) estimates that a staggering £23bn a year of UK consumer spending is now influenced by online customer reviews.
I am delighted to publish this research that we have done in collaboration with The Behaviouralist on how fake online reviews influence consumer choices. Many of us rely heavily on online customer reviews – and especially at present – to help choose between the different options when we buy a new product or service. Unfortunately, those reviews are not always genuine. Previous Which? investigations have repeatedly uncovered sellers using fake reviews on several of the biggest online platforms. Our new behavioural research proves just how effective those reviews can be at misleading consumers.
The experiment
As you can see from the video below, we found fake reviews were highly effective at duping consumers into buying poorer-quality products, with more than twice as many consumers making bad choices when fake reviews were present. This increases the risk of people spending their money on products that do not meet their needs and, in the most extreme cases, products that are potentially fake or dangerous. Here's how the experiment went
Our research found that as the level of fake review activity increased, the chance of a Don't Buy product being chosen increased massively from around one in 10 (10.5%) to one in four (25%).
Tackling fake reviews
With fake reviews having such large impacts on consumer behaviour, it is paramount that review sites do more to crackdown on this issue to prevent consumers from being misled and ensure the trust of their users is not being undermined.
We welcome the CMA’s recent announcement that it is investigating how fake reviews are being used to manipulate online shoppers on major websites and expect the regulator to take the strongest possible action against sites that fail to tackle this problem.
Read more about our full experiment report here.