These days on the Web I’m seeing stars …  As I book my hotel for my next trip, look for a bar to meet some mates in London, consider a film to watch in the evening, I search for those little indicators of quality that will guide me to making the best choice …

The power of consumer reviews is undeniable in influencing purchasing behaviours.  However, I think it’s time we got our telescopes out and took a peek into the firmament to see what is driving reviews and ratings behaviour – in particular to assess whether review sites actually give a balanced perspective on the good, not so good and sometimes bad businesses or products listed thereon.

The 5-star-ratings model is the de facto standard for review sites.  But is the distribution of stars uniform over the 5-point range?  It would appear not … as this distribution from Yelp in September shows.

A whopping 67% of all reviews on this very popular site gave either 4 or 5 stars.  A measly 15% of reviews gave businesses 1 or 2 stars.   Why is this the case? and should we be worried about it?

I’ve just finished reading an intriguing report by Jupiter Research on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in Retail that highlighted a couple of very salient findings. For a start Jupiter underlined just how central reviews and ratings are to online purchasing decisions today as it found that 77% of US online shoppers look at product reviews and ratings.

But what really caught my attention was the difference in consumer behaviour after a positive and a negative shopping experience online.  Consumers are, according to the research, more likely to take a survey (43%) after a good experience than a bad one (17%), more likely to tell friends about good experience (31%) than a bad one (21%), and more likely to write a product review about a product they liked (9%) than one they didn’t (4%).

So it does appear that as consumers we really only want to tell the good news and this results in reviews being skewed towards the top end of the scale.  If this pattern of behaviour holds true then I would argue that the 5 point scale is potentially flawed as it presents an illusion of objectivity and a paucity of insight –   If 67% of the restaurants in a town I want to visit have 4 or 5 stars, how do I then choose between them?

And this gets me onto a second concern which is the trouble an aggregated star rating system has in conveying the richness of a product or service experience.  Julian Blom at LBi sent me this picture that illustrates the problem beautifully.

In this case a ‘neutral’ three star product rating is given based on the reviews of two consumers with polar opposite opinions.  This example shows that any aggregated rating system suffers from the degree of freedom it has from the original consumer experience.

Compound this distance from the original experience with the fact that consumers tend towards giving positive rather than negative reviews and I can’t help thinking that star-based review systems may have some fundamental limitations.

Looking beyond the instant gratification of a star rating, an alternative approach to getting deeper insight into a product or service experience, and the quality of the business providing it, is available through sites such as Get Satisfaction that enable consumers and businesses to interact openly around product or service issues.