Trust & Authenticity

Deemed a must have : is brand trust & retaining it's authentic identity the backbone of equity building? Peter Bond & Sri discuss it's reality and what it takes via ratings & reviews to succeed.

1. What is brand authenticity & why does it matter so much during these times? Brand authenticity is about how consumers who have used a product talk about or visually show their experiences with the product and any interactions with the brand when answering questions or dealing with product concerns. Really it is about honest brand enthusiasm. It matters in an increasingly digital age because consumers have social amplification tools that brands can’t control so ensuring consumers are pleased with your brand will ensure that you can grow your brand in the long run through establishing trust. Brands can harness this authentic content in their advertising, social media and product pages on brand & retailer sites. Customer-generated images, testimonials and verbatims can be amplified through paid media. Lastly, on many sites, you will see that the default search ranking is driven by a term called relevance. This is an algorithm that usually involves a number of different factors including the product sales rate, the average star rating and the number of ratings. Often, you can change the sort ranking to one of those attributes in addition to others like price or whether a product is new. In any event, ensuring that your brand has sufficient content and great ratings will definitely affect the search results, ensuring your products appear at the top of page 1 of a search or listing page.
2. Do you feel brands & retailers are well on their way with authenticity earning consumer trust? Just 10 years ago, I remember a conversation with a brand manager who was trying to play whack-a-mole suppressing all of the social media posts that related to the brand she was managing. It was an effort in futility. Today, brands are learning to leverage the content their brand enthusiasts are creating, resharing on social media and even displaying on their product pages. Of course some brand managers do their best to control the narrative. I saw a cotton swab band manager on TV a few months ago trying to tell the reporter of all the uses for her product. Despite the reporter’s efforts to get the brand manager to admit that swabs are used to clean ears, she just wouldn’t concede to this application for legal reasons, not that legal reasons should be ignored. But, I think we can agree that we all know the primary use for cotton swabs. I would never advise an alcohol manufacturer post a consumer video that shows underage people consuming their products. In the end, consumers know what authenticity looks like. 
3. What types of authentic content should brands be seeking? Brands should be seeking many forms of content. First and foremost, product ratings and reviews are an ideal form of authentic content because it helps consumers trying to make a purchase decision get to the core issue of quality. If they can ascertain whether other consumers who have purchased the product liked it and can understand the appropriate uses of the product, they can make an informed purchase decision. Brands should also enable consumers to ask questions about a product prior to purchasing and get a response from a qualified subject matter expert. Let’s not forget that we are an increasingly visual society, so collecting images and videos of consumers using your brand is ideal to convey real life applications. Brands can encourage enthusiasts to generate authentic social media campaigns through hashtags and @mentions.
4. Do influencers deliver trust and authenticity to brands? (refer to your webinar & promise to share the link) My company PowerReviews recently hosted a free webinar on this very topic. We’ll share a link to let listeners know where to find it. Influencers really only deliver brand authenticity and trust if the consumer understands that they actually tried the product. Mega celebrity influencers like the Kardashians help brands build broad awareness, but not trust. If you are familiar with the recent Hyundai TV commercial featuring celebrities talking in thick Boston accents about the car brand’s new automated “smart park” feature, you need to ask yourself: do you really believe Captain America drives a Hyudnai? I sure don’t. Trust and authenticity is much more like to come from everyday influencers who are not getting paid to give opinions on products. They may have received a free sample in exchange for authentic feedback, but that is it. Who is an everyday influencer? You mom, your spouse, your neighbor, your co-worker, the person behind you in the grocery line...when we used to shop in physical stores. They have a few hundred social media followers, most of them who actually know the person and trust her/his opinions. Can you address or preach to brands why UGC on social media should be encouraged - and if brands should be making ads with this UGC
5. What are the key metrics for a brand to measure it’s authentic feedback health? Great question. By no means is this an exhaustive list, but it includes the major attributes: average star rating is important. And don’t think a perfect 5 is what you really want. Studies we’ve conducted with Northwestern tell us that the ideal real is somewhere between 4.2 and 4.8. Consumers don’t believe any product has a perfect rating. Review volume is also important. Reviews per product is also critical. If you have a large assortment but most of the reviews are associated with your biggest selling items, the tail of your assortment is likely appearing on the last few pages of a search. Make sure you are filling out your entire assortment with authentic content. Review length is important if you want to learn from your customers. Sampling from reviews is ideal in this area because seasoned sampling communities will generate higher quality reviews with meaningful feedback, not just star ratings. Recency of content is particularly important for younger generations. If you run a sampling campaign to fill out your content library, that content begins aging the day you complete the campaign. Put in place mechanisms to collect content as frequently as possible to show consumers that the brand has recent engagement. Lastly, sentiment is important. Even the best reviews can contain some negative sentiment. Make sure you are able to analyze your collected content to understand where there are opportunities to improve your perception to consumers. Brand managers always ask me what is the ideal number of minimum reviews. It varies by product type and item cost but a good rule of thumb is having at least 50 reviews helps assure consumers that the content is authentic. Make sure to leverage your social media followers by amplifying what brand enthusiasts are liking about your brand. More followers means more opportunities to establish trust.
6. How can a brand or a retailer ensure the consumer-generated content they present to consumers is authentic? In order to ensure that the customer-generated content a brand presents to consumers is authentic, appropriate and relevant, the brand needs to select a third party platform partner that has all the capabilities of moderating and presenting the content  at scale. Moderation refers to the process by which the submitted content is evaluated before reaching consumers. Some moderation is automated. The component usually covers fraud protection that detects known IP address pumping out vast numbers of reviews, typically either very favorable or very unfavorable in nature. Other automated moderation would include profanity filters, safety or legal flagging and other key words the brand has identified as needed to prohibit immediate publishing. Lastly, if a brand wants to make sure that the content is relevant and appropriate, human moderation is necessary. A review or a visual submission may not include any profanity, may not have come from a fraudulent source and may not include any flagged key words, but it may not be relevant. If someone writes a review to complain that a product arrived 3 days later than originally stated, that is not about the product, it is about the delivery service. Human moderation will catch this. Also, platforms should not encourage or make it easy for brands to suppress negative reviews. There should be no universal suppression feature that temps brands to remove negative reviews. Brands are better served responding to each negative review in an attempt to resolve a customer’s concerns and publishing that in the review notes so that consumers can see that a brand is engaging with concerns. Our studies show that disgruntled consumers who are engaged by brands and their issues are resolved very frequently transform into strong brand advocates. 
7. How can a brand generate quality authentic content? Expecting customers to come to your website with the express intention of writing a product review, particularly if you don’t have a direct-to-consumer eCommerce capability, is honestly unrealistic. Brands with D2C eCommerce can use their order feeds to solicit reviews, images and social media posts via outbound email or SMS. If a brand is about to launch, adding a line extension or restaging a brand, prior purchasers don’t exist. Accessing a community of active everyday influencers who write reviews in exchange for product samples is a great way to get quality meaningful feedback that can be displayed on the brand’s website and retailer sites as soon as the product is available for sale to help inject authenticity into an equation where there is not history of brand usage. Wouldn't this be seen as not authentic? Brands with active CRM databases can use this community of existing brand enthusiasts to write reviews. We recently launched with a new client that sent out a newsletter request to its CRM list and collected over a thousand reviews in several days at no incremental costs. Brands should solicit reviews from brand enthusiasts via social media. Brands can use company stores and in-market sampling events to collect reviews. They can also print QR code cards on packages that drive consumers to “write a review” pages. 
8. How should retailers ensure shared content is authentic - also cover - Why should retailers generate their own authentic content in addition to or instead of shared content? One area where retailers cannot source authentic content is in private label. We recently worked with a grocery retailer to capture a substantial amount of content for its private label brands. We saw a study that showed positive customer reviews are the biggest driver of conversion to private label. It makes sense because the #1 consumer concern with private label is quality. Product ratings & reviews go to directly address these concerns. We used the retailer’s eCommerce and in-store transactions associated with its loyalty program to target verified buyers for reviews, ensuring authentic content collection. Since elevating coverage to over 90% with 30% of items having over 100 reviews each, this retailer has enjoyed more than 50% lift to private label eCommerce sales simply by displaying reviews, badging the qualifying products as “top rated” and integrating the results into the relevance search results calculation. Retailers can amplify authentic brand content through their social handles
9. What are the elements of a “perfectly authentic” review? First, you need to know that the person writing the review actually used the product being reviewed. Verified purchasers from D2C or in-store purchases associated with a loyalty identifier can accomplish this. So can sampling communities. Next, the review should contain some key elements like a star rating, a header/subject/tile. The author will need to include their email address, not for display but so that the platform can validate that the reviewer is associated with an email address. Most importantly, the body of the review should include meaningful feedback about the product and its usage. Often times, brands ask custom questions relevant to the product type. Example, an apparel brand wants to reduce returns, so asking a reviewer to describe whether the product fits true to size or not will help consumers considering a purchase to consider what to order. 
10. Which companies are exhibiting best practices in sharing authentic content? For transparency sake, I will reveal when a company I mention is a PowerReviews client. Ulta, our client, is highly engaged in collecting all forms of content. They actively collect reviews from instore and online purchases. They collect so much content that when a product’s review count exceeds 500, the default display moves from “all reviews” to “reviews written on Ulta.com” because they believe Ulta customers trust other Ulta customers more than just anonymous reviewers. They also employ their suppliers to act as subject matter experts for questions. If an Ulta shopper asks a question about a product, the question is immediately routed to the brand’s designated SME to answer within 72 hours, all through a Q&A platform we supply that is free tony brand, regardless of whether they work with PowerReviews or not. L’Oreal is another great brand. Though they do not use our platform, L’Oreal leverages our everyday influencer community via sampling to generate regular and frequent content that they share through their platform partner to retailers carrying their products. This is called syndication. You can identify syndicated reviews on retailer sites because they are badged as having been sourced from brand sites. Canyon Bakehouse, a PR client, uses our social collection tool to find instagram posts that brand enthusiasts have made. The platform allows them to identify the posts they like and with a few clicks, we connect with the content author and secure the rights for Canyon Bakehouse to display on their site’s product pages. 

Our intent is not to forecast the future or suggest there's only one way. Our ambition is to see the CPG industry progress in delivering maximum value for the consumer via quality products widely available to all.