Tag Archives: men

Online Reviews: Buyers Trust, Companies Manipulate

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For a guy who despises shopping, doing it online is a felicity. I can avoid the crowd of people checking for bargain. I don’t have to transfer shops to find a stock for my 12 size feet.  My choices are varied – selections extend to different brands and designs viewed on separate windows all within five minutes. And I can do it anytime of the day!

 

A repulsing shortcoming of online shopping is people won’t see the actual product. They can’t try it and see how it looks on them. They won’t know for sure if it will deliver the promise of the brand. But user reviews will address this this issue.

 

Online review is a place for buyers to rant a frustration or grant a satisfaction. These people probably have the same need as you that the product can suffice. And if the general consensus of the review is positive, then it will raise confidence towards purchasing.

 

This word of mouth marketing is arguably the most effective method of promoting a product. The Local Consumer Review Survey in 2012 found that 72% of buyers trust online reviews like they are personal recommendations. It is as if the whole community is a friend voicing out a valuable consumer opinion.

 

A new study from the University of Melbourne, Australia took a keen interest on online reviews. If the first review of a product or service is positive, it lingers on our minds. The negative reviews that may come later in the page won’t matter as our opinion is already influenced by the positive one we’ve read.

 

This gives companies a leeway for manipulation. Yelp, an online review database of local businesses, was sued claiming that the website makes offer to clear out negative reviews IF they advertised on the website. Writer Todd Rutherford used to pull in $28,000 a month writing false positive reviews for books. Competing hotels submit negative reviews against each other on TripAdvisor and Expedia. It is a dirty venture.

 

For us customers, we better skip the first review or just be wary of the influence of that first positive review on us. Let’s be critical of too good or too bad reviews that may not reflect the sentiment of a normal customer. But even knowing these, it would still be laborious to sort out the bogus reviews from real rating.

 

How important is customer reviews for your online shopping?

He’s Male, She’s Female

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It doesn’t take us more than a split second to determine whether the people we see around us are male or female. It happens automatically, like a reflex. But reflexes can be suppressed, like the awkward and unavoidable moment when you say sir to a woman. How do our brains know what gender our eyes see?

 

It’s strange that when you’re born, you don’t understand a word, literally. Only when you’re told that he is your father and that she is your mother, it becomes clear that there is a difference between them. Or did you already know that? We understand the word ‘male’ when it is explained to us. But once we know what that word means, we automatically know that he does fit the description, and she doesn’t. The description itself, however, is pre-programmed in our brains. There is a logical explanation for this because in order to reproduce this, information is necessary. But it is a mystery how our brains seamlessly connect the word to the description.

 

What exactly is the description then? Men are more muscled, but woman can train their muscles as well. The chin and cheekbones of men are more prominent, also because the faces of women hold more fat. Women’s eyebrows are high arched, and men have more facial hair and their skin is thicker. This is only a fraction of the checklist. Brains process faces almost too fast. Are they very fast, or is there something else, something our brains can perceive, but we can’t?

 

The only moment you start wondering what makes a man a man and a woman a woman is when your brains hesitate. We are challenging them, for example, by wearing clothes. As we grow up our brains might get used to, maybe an outdated assumption, women having longer hair than men. Or to the difference between clothes, to women’s tight jeans, to men’s boring t-shirts. But women wear clothes originally designed for men all the time. This really will get our brains confused, especially when they already have trouble determining the gender by facial characteristics. If plastic surgery becomes even more widespread, will our brains keep up, or is the 21st century too much to handle?