MarCom Professional

Opinion rules

Further evidence of the power of opinion online today. The influential French-based venture capitalists, Banexi Ventures Partners, have today announced an investment in Reevoo, the online publishers of genuine customer reviews.

What's significant is that Banexi successfully backed Kelkoo, the price comparison site, that subsequently sold to Yahoo for nearly 500m Euros a few years ago. In the announcement of the investment, out this morning, Banexi have said the following:

“Online promotional strategies need to engage with what the customer is thinking and wanting. Other promotional mechanics, such as price comparison, have been damaged by a very mixed quality of execution. The strength of Reevoo is that the published customer opinions are always real and unvarnished, which means that the model is untarnished. This creates a win/win/win ecosystem: shoppers want clarity about the products they’re thinking of buying, retailers are more credible for hosting real opinions and product manufacturers are looking for direct and meaningful feedback from consumers.”

To me, this is further evidence that the web is becoming an increasingly qualitative medium - it's opinions as opposed to quanitiative measures that have the most powerful impact on user behaviour. There's no better evidence than Reevoo's feedback from their retail partners, that include a host of UK household names. Retailers report that conversion rates for products are 80-100% higher when they sit adjacent to genuine customer reviews from Revoo. It's almost as though customers have been put in charge of the stores - now there's an idea.