Does going somewhere solo lead to better reviews afterwards?
Rebecca Ratner, Dean’s professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, determines whether this is the case.
Rebecca Ratner received a Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton University and has been a visiting scholar in the marketing departments of the Harvard Business School, Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores factors underlying suboptimal consumer decision-making and focuses on memory, variety seeking, and the influence of social norms. Her research has appeared in marketing, psychology, and decision-making journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been featured in the media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News: This Morning, and NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
Want a Review You Can Trust? Ask Someone Who Did It Alone
The most trusted reviewers of a leisure experience are people doing the activity alone.
For the past decade, I have studied people’s reluctance to do activities alone, finding that they often enjoy solo experiences more than they thought they would. For this latest research, my co-author Yuechen Wu, at Oklahoma State University, and I examined actual reviews from TripAdvisor, which included details from each reviewer about whether they were with anyone else.
We compared solo reviews with reviews from people accompanied by friends or family.
We found that other TripAdvisor users gave more “likes” to reviews and recommendations from people who did the activity alone. We confirmed the results with several lab experiments, where we asked participants a series of questions about people we described as having engaged in activities, either solo or accompanied. [I removed a phrase here]
In these experiments, we again observed people were more likely to say they would heed the advice of the solo person. The fact that they are alone makes others perceive them as more credible, because they are perceived as more focused on the activity.
We hope more people take a cue from other solo consumers. Don’t let it stop you if you don’t happen to have a friend or a partner or a child to go with you for an activity you want to do! Live your life and do the things that you think would be fun.
And if you do get out there, tell people about your experience, because you’ll be an even better source of word-of-mouth than someone who went with a companion.
Marketers should also take note. If they want influential reviews about their experiences, they should encourage people to come solo and write reviews. Don’t neglect your solo patrons and customers. Treat them well. What they say actually is going to carry a lot of weight.
Read More:
[Sage Journals] – The Influential Solo Consumer: When Engaging in Activities Alone (vs. Accompanied) Increases the Impact of Recommendations
