Ratings "J Curve"

If the product quality is maintained then you can get a J curve in every business, with respect to users reviews. But once the product gets famous, the product sellers gives a cheaper quality in sake of brand.
http://www.cdmacellulars.com/

An obvious explanation for the J Curve.

If people are influenced by user generated reviews and I believe that they are, than customers are more likely to buy items with good reviews. Thus it stands to reason that future customers will also likely be satisfied with their purchase. In this situation the accurate representation of a product and its relative price should normally drive a J Curve.

Also it is most likely that products or companies whose customer satisfaction is inconsistent would typically not use a feedback system that would demonstrate their relative poor satisfaction levels.

In my experience, the take-away from a U-shape curve is not that your respondents are more "balanced", but that your quality issues are rampant – inconsistent process, customer service, and product quality to name a few. The more the J-curve looks like a U, quality is root cause because it indicates high levels of variation among customer experiences. L's say you're not meeting customer expectations, while U's suggest you are completely out of control. Conversely, the more hockey-stick the J (upward to positive scores), the greater an indication that prodcut quality, customer service, and internal processes are in sync. Virtuous cycles–by definition–work.

That said, you can't rest on your laurels. I like the way Ben suggests variation among "happy" responses to tease out additional shades of gray, and using that as a segue for getting additional feedback.

Product reviews are great for the webmasters. They get a lot of content on the site free. Either by way of their own reviews, which are anyway copied from some other source, or by way of reviews written by readers. This helps a lot in SEO.
When you reads posts on any site, there is so much of contradicting views that one is bound to get confused. Moreover, you do not know which review is genuine.
I think, if you are really unhappy with a product, writing a reviews vent out your frustrations for the product. Although, you are sure that not even 1% of the site visitors will not read it. The same holds true for happy buyers of products.

I wonder if it would be more of a U shape if the reviews were anonymous. Perhaps people are less likely to give negative ratings or sumbit any ratings if they know their identity will be revealed. E.g., how many times have you given you waitress negative feedback on those restaurant surveys that occassionally accompany the bill? I'm running a small experiment myself WRT rating people anonymously online (www.tomslist.net). There's only a couple hundred ratings so far and the distribution looks a bit more U-ish but it's still quite early. We'll see how it goes.

Sam,

We have approx. 18,000 user reviews of mobile phones contributed to our site and aggregated from other sources. Of those 18k 25% of reviewers gave their phone full marks, 10/10.
More on that here if you're interested: http://www.cellphones.ca/1779

Hi – I originally left this comment at a blog that links here, but am reposting here as I thought you might find it useful.

This is as much of a question anchoring problem as it is a problem of certain customers responding. I'm a survey researcher, and attended a presentation recently which covered this issue (I've hunted, but cannot find a relevant link, sorry). The gist was that more useful, distinguishing, information could be obtained by chaninging the response options from somthing like:

Extremely good
…
Extremely bad

To something like:
Way beyond expectations
Better than expected for a good firm
About what I expect from a good firm
Not as good as expected for a good firm
Way below expectations

You'd need to play around with the wording, but the effect should be to gravitate answers to the midpoint, so that the extremes actually serve their purpose: to discriminate between the average, the really good and the really bad.

Of course, if the aim is only to weed out the really bad, then this may not matter much – the bad should show up regardless.

Thanks for sharing – very counter-intuitive. And very good to know when you're pushing to enable more openness online.

Coincidentally, a couple weeks after we announced the J-Curve KellerFay came out with a study that found 63% of word of mouth (online or offline) is positive. The conventional wisdom that the majority of word of mouth is negative is no longer conventional nor wisdom!

I think the negative reviewers will be less likely to rate but will provide bad word of mouth in the real world.

This provides two possible dangers – firstly passive viewers will see the J curve effect and discount its veracity, secondly and more importantly the absence of low ratings may breed a false sense of achievement in those being rated. My philosophy has always been to look for the dissatisfied and determine if their dissatisfaction is valid – that way lies progress.