The Price of Praise: What Incentivized Reviews Do for Brands

Purpose of Analysis

Nowadays, it seems like tons of brands have started to “incentivize” reviews. Shein, for example, offers customers a decent number of spending credits for posting reviews and/or photos after purchasing a product.

Most of the time, people who had a negative experience with a brand or product are more likely to leave a review than someone who was neutral or generally satisfied. So a major advantage of a brand offering incentives like these is that it motivates more satisfied customers to leave reviews as well.

Something that’s been a little controversial, though, is that Shein doesn’t make it super clear how you can earn extra points. And many customers have actually speculated that posting positive reviews that get more “likes” improves their chances at earning more points. Some customers have complained that this leads to an abundance of biased reviews — which in turn makes them less trusting of Shein.

Other companies that have started to incentivize reviews try to avoid controversies like this by being transparent with customers — for example, they’ll usually tag any incentivized reviews as being “incentivized.”

Free People is one brand that does exactly this. So we decided to run an analysis on Free People to see how these incentivized reviews might actually affect their rating and public perception.

The Analysis

To do this, we used our sentiment analysis program on data from two sources: 1) Comments on this viral TikTok video featuring a dress from Free People and 2) incentivized product reviews from Free People’s website for the same dress.

After looking at the proportion of positive/negative sentiment for both, we first ended up finding that not surprisingly, Free People’s incentivized reviews tended to be about 10% more positive compared to relevant comments from the TikTok.

We will say that we also found a few pretty significant differences in the focal points of the comments/reviews between the two platforms.

For example, TikTok commenters seemed to talk a lot more about the actual style and price of the dress, which makes sense because a lot of commenters actually don’t own the dress themselves. And Free People reviewers focused a lot more on the actual sizing/quality of the dress.

Meaningfulness of Results

Our little experiment shows that it does actually seem like incentivized product reviews do skew ratings to be on the higher side. BUT while most incentivized reviews were indeed positive, there were quite a few negative ones in there too. And this implies that incentives aren’t necessarily biasing reviews — but instead encouraging satisfied customers to share their positive experiences.

And since unhappy customers are usually more likely to leave reviews than happy customers, it’s clear how this would help brands balance out their overall rating in a fair-play way.

But more than anything, this specific experiment suggests that current and potential customers tend to look for and discuss different things on different platforms. So for a more holistic understanding of customer opinions, it’s important not to limit yourself to just one source of feedback.

‍