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If you want to persuade, start with a bang
Helpful reviews are like good movies or a good novel: If you’re hooked right away, you stay and remember. No matter how short, a review tells a story in much the same way as a novel. If you want to persuade, it should start with something dramatic and sensational or the key takeaway, rather than saving the best elements for the end. This is just one of the findings of research by my colleagues and me into what gives consumer reviews their power to influence consumer choices. Whether consumers are booking a hotel room, choosing a restaurant, deciding on what movie to see, or buying any number of things, it is likely they have read online reviews before making their decision. In view of the influence reviews have, there is considerable interest in knowing the qualities that make them compelling and persuasive. What is it that makes a consumer review persuasive, though?

Helpful reviews show who did what, where, when, and why
In fact, the same elements that hook the reader of a novel also exist in reviews. A story – no matter how short it is – has the power to draw you in and grab your attention if it uses certain narrative elements. We conducted three studies to determine these elements. In the first project, we tested the helpfulness of consumers’ reviews on Tripadvisor according to a helpfulness rating provided by consumers on the platform (see Box 1). In the second study, panelists on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform, rated how engaging and helpful they perceived a selection of reviews to be. In the third study, 156 students read reviews about a trip to Agra, India and evaluated them along the same criteria as in Study 2. In addition, they indicated how much they wanted to travel to Agra after reading the reviews. All studies showed that the more narrative elements (see Figure 1) that were present, the more the reviews were regarded as captivating and persuasive. The most persuasive reviews tell who did what, where, when, and why, and provide emotional transitions and climaxes at the beginning.

Why writing and recognizing helpful reviews is important
Online reviews differ from offline reviews in scale, scope, and distribution of expertise. Today, more opinions and user-generated content are available to consumers than ever before. Not only the scale, but also the scope of reviews is enormous: Opinions are no longer restricted to a subset of products or services for sale. Instead, consumers can now even find reviews about the least commercial experiences, such as a visit to the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Reviews are also no longer restricted to a handful of elite reviewers. Instead, anyone can write about any purchase, distributing and democratizing expertise. This means that any consumer with an Internet connection and an opinion can claim to be an expert. The advantage is that consumers thus have access to a multitude of perspectives instead of only those of a professional cadre. On the other hand, the quality of many reviews can be questioned, and the ability to access more information about a wider-than-ever-before range of purchases can result in information overload. In addition, there is, of course, the big issue of fake reviews, which means that consumers are vulnerable to deceit. Tripadvisor revealed in a report that more than 1 million fake reviews were removed from the platform in 2018 alone. Obviously, there is a role for digital curation by managers and reviewers. Consumers are always more likely to buy something when the review tells a captivating story – there is no need to lie about it. This is what social media influencers, professional reviewers, software developers, event managers, advertisers, and social network managers can do to raise review quality.