Lights, camera, action!
If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, I’m here to learn about the Consumer Goods industry, not Hollywood!” Stick with us.
Just like Consumer Goods brands, blockbuster movies have their own formula for success, and it all starts with reviews. Picture this: filmmakers actively seek feedback from critics and audiences, fine-tuning their movies to perfection. So, what’s stopping you from using this tactic too?
For many brands, the review strategy starts and ends with review generation. But where those review strategies are ending, the most innovative brands are just getting warmed up. Reviews provide invaluable insights about your customers and the market as a whole, and have the power to drive higher conversion rates, more sales, and repeat customers.
It's time to bring that Hollywood magic to your brand. Learn how reviews can be your secret weapon for refining products, capturing market share, and creating experiences that leave customers craving more. It's time to roll out the red carpet for your brand's star-studded review strategy!
Let’s start by looking at the big picture to understand what a full-cycle review strategy looks like.
Reviews are truly a company-wide issue. They impact every part of consumer goods brands. But there are a few teams that should be the most concerned with a review strategy: Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Innovations, and Insights. The outputs and responsibilities for each of these teams differ slightly, but the core strategy around product reviews remains the same.
For marketing, product reviews provide valuable insights into consumer preferences, pain points, and motivations. By analyzing reviews of their brand and their compeitors, marketers can tailor their messaging, positioning, and campaigns to align with the themes that resonate the most with their target audience. Leveraging review data allows marketers to capture market share, increase conversion rates, and drive sales by delivering messages that address customer needs and expectations.
Product teams can benefit immensely from analyzing product reviews. Reviews offer direct feedback on how well products meet or exceed customer expectations, allowing product teams to identify areas for improvement and prioritize product enhancements. After all, “real world” customer experiences have the ability to unearth usage moments and pain points that are likely missed in a controlled testing environment. By understanding the features and attributes that consumers love the most, product teams can optimize product descriptions, highlight key benefits, and make informed decisions regarding product evolution, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.
Customer success teams play a vital role in ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. By analyzing product reviews, customer success teams gain valuable insights into customer experiences, pain points, and areas of improvement. This knowledge enables them to proactively address customer concerns, provide personalized support, and enhance the overall customer journey. Leveraging review data empowers customer success teams to foster repeat-customer relationships, and drive customer advocacy.
For innovation departments, product reviews serve as a goldmine of ideas and opportunities. By examining competitor reviews, innovators can identify gaps in the market, uncover unmet needs, and gain a comprehensive understanding of industry trends. This knowledge can inform product roadmap decisions, guide the development of new features or products, and position brands as leaders in their industry. By leveraging the insights from reviews, innovation teams can drive continuous improvement and stay ahead of the curve.
Insights teams thrive on data-driven decision-making, and product reviews offer a rich source of valuable information. Through manual or AI-powered review analysis, insights teams can extract actionable data and answer critical questions about consumer sentiment, satisfaction, and preferences. In fact, with the right strategy in place, the information is available instantly and is constantly being updated. This data can inform strategic decisions, such as identifying the most common reasons for negative reviews or determining the features that have the most positive impact on consumer experience. By leveraging review insights, teams can uncover hidden patterns, optimize business strategies, and drive meaningful growth.
Now let’s dive deeper into each of these stages and learn exactly how you can use them in your organization.
Consumer brands are well aware that generating reviews is mission-critical. Positive reviews build trust, and trust drives sales. Neutral and negative reviews, on the other hand, provide useful feedback directly from real consumers. Review generation should blend seamlessly into the customer experience, making it frictionless and simple to leave feedback. No matter your specific brand needs, there are three pillars of consumer-focused review generation.
Customers don’t just review products, they review experiences. The best brands put a bow on the consumer experience (sometimes literally). Adding a special touch can be simple and small, but will leave a strong impression.
Brands like Crate & Barrel, J Crew, and Bark Box find success in generating reviews using personalized emails that ask for reviews of recent purchases and pair the ask with a plug for current promotions. This creates an experience that shows the brand values its customers and cares enough to make the connection personal.
Incentives don’t need to be monetary! Incentive is all about making it matter to the consumer, and there are plenty of ways to do that. Here are a few of our favorites:
For leading consumer brands, review strategy doesn’t end once the reviews are generated. That’s just the beginning.
Product reviews are organic feedback directly from people who have experienced your product. This information is more authentic than surveys, it's faster than focus groups, and it's public information (so you can look at competitor reviews as well).
Before we dive in too far, it is important to note that there are two ways to conduct review analysis.
Manual review analysis usually involves a spreadsheet and maybe a review aggregator such as Bazaarvoice or PowerReviews. It can take a while, but you can still execute some solid review analysis with basic tools. Manual analysis is limited by the time it takes to extract data, data set size, and skill set.
AI review analysis does the heavy lifting for you and lets you ask questions and get data-backed answers. It aggregates all your reviews (and your competitors) and runs analysis automatically. No need to pull samples and find connections manually.
This is where Yogi comes in. Yogi is the world’s first and only AI review analysis platform that focuses exclusively on consumer goods, giving brands direct access to the preferences and pain points of real consumers.
Let’s start simple with a question that can easily be answered by manual analysis.
“What is the most common reason for our 1-star reviews?”
This is a question all brands should be asking constantly to keep their reviews up, and fortunately, it is one of the easiest to find the answer to. By looking at all 1-star reviews for a product and searching common keywords to discover the one with the highest frequency you can answer this question quickly and have data to support a decision to focus on one specific part of the product experience.
Now for a more complicated question that you might need Yogi to answer.
“What features should we highlight on our PDP?”
“What should our product team prioritize to improve sentiment?”
“What themes are trending on an individual SKU compared to its direct competitors?”
This is a question that many brands might not have a data-based answer to, or if they do, they are relying on expensive and slow focus groups or market testing, when product reviews have the answer all along.
Yogi aggregates all your product reviews (and your competitors’ reviews too!) and analyzes them using AI. From there, you can rank all attributes and features by their impact on product reviews!
This instantly shows you the features and attributes that consumers love the most, letting you tailor your strategy to align directly with the real-world experiences your customers have. Similarly, it shows you the features and attributes that have the most negative impact on consumer experience, giving you the opportunity to pivot away.
One example of analysis in action is Yogi’s partnership with Tylenol Dissolve Packs. Using Yogi, Tylenol discovered that many customers didn’t understand how to correctly use the product. They also discovered that those who did use it correctly loved how quickly it worked. Using this information, Tylenol was able to update its PDP’s and packaging to include usage instructions and add fast-acting claims. These quick changes resulted in an increase in organic star rating of 1 full star as well as a substantial increase in conversion rate.
Once you’ve learned from reviews it's time to apply it. Here are a few of the first outputs brands should consider when executing their review strategies.
PDP: Product description pages are prime examples of low-hanging fruit to adjust based on reviews. PDPs have limited space to highlight features and attributes, so it is important to make the most of it and align it to the most recent consumer trends and habits. Emphasize features and attributes that appear with a high frequency in positive reviews, while de-emphasizing those that appear in negative reviews.
Marketing Positioning and Campaigns: Just like PDPs, the focus of your messaging should be aligned with the themes your target audience cares the most about and mention the most in reviews. Consider leveraging frequent negative review themes in competitor products to capture market share.
Product Evolution: By identifying the elements of your product that appear the most in negative reviews, you can build a data-based priority ranking of what changes your product should have. You can also create realistic projections those changes will have on sales numbers by extrapolating rating impact to conversion rates.
Supply Chain and Fulfillment: Reviews are the best way to track user experience around these parts of the consumer journey. Certain retailers selling expired or stale products? Reviews can tell you. New packaging not shipping well? You can bet reviewers will let you know. The best part is that reviews come in consistently so you can track these trends over time and discover changes as they occur!
We've explored how, like film critics and test audiences help create blockbuster movies, product reviews can be your secret weapon for business success. They offer more than just social proof; they hold invaluable insights and opportunities to refine your products, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately grow your brand.
Now that you have unlocked the hidden potential of product reviews and witnessed their remarkable impact on your business, what’s next? It's time to take action and harness the power of customer feedback to its fullest extent. Together, we’ll delve deeper and explore the comprehensive strategies and techniques that will propel your brand to new heights.
To fully embark on this transformative journey, we invite you to join our comprehensive course, where we'll guide you step-by-step in leveraging the full potential of product reviews. Get ready to unlock your brand's true potential and watch it soar in customer satisfaction and sales!
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