Exponential Growth and Positive Feedback

I hate to say it, but reviews matter for more than their effect on click-through to your Shopify site. They count as an indirect indicator of enthusiastic repeat purchases. They indirectly cue you into the qualitative degree of your fan-thusiasm. Is that a word? Oh well.

I don’t care if reviews are on your site, on a Google listing, or your Amazon product pages. Positive reviews based on superior product design and decent-to-excellent ad targeting will often generate a positive feedback loop. The latter is critical to the mechanics of exponential growth in sales. Positive reviews in impressive numbers form an elemental kind of social proof in the early years when word-of-mouth is still spreading slowly. It nudges folks towards trial. 

You need to be exceedingly memorable to accelerate quickly and early as a consumer brand. In food and beverage, much of that memorability is sensory. Still, a percentage of it should be related to some kind of social outcome (even dietary outcomes have an implied social audience) of importance to your consumer audience… And hopefully, this outcome shows up in the review text online. Then your reviews can become free advertising of sorts. 

The one thing that can be misleading about reviews is that they will throw together consumers who have very different positive associations with your product line. This creates a need to prioritize one consumer group over another as you formulate an initial strategy or update it. But this is your prerogative as the owner of the business. To pick the optimal audience and find more like them. 

Just know that the aggregative amount and inbound velocity of positive reviews are worth managing as a primal measurement tool for the power of the brand you’re building. It also can form a research data source, especially when you can segment the reviews based on their actual order history and order frequency.