Reviews With Pictures Are (Sometimes) Helpful

Source: Generated with AI ∙ June 7, 2024 at 3:05 PM

These days, people are surrounded by reviews that can be used to guide purchases and choices of experiences. User reviews are incorporated into lots of retail websites, and there are many websites that are focused primarily on providing reviews in different arenas.

There are many factors that may make a review more or less helpful. For example, it is useful to know whether a reviewer is similar to you in relevant ways to determine whether their taste is likely to match yours. Some reviewers are also better at describing products and experiences than others.

Over the last several years, it has also become more common for people to post pictures with their reviews. A review of a website may include pictures of the food, while a review of a hotel might include pictures of the property or pictures of the view from the rooms.

Do those pictures make a review more helpful for readers? This question was explored in a 2024 paper by Gizem Ceylan, Kristin Diehl, and Davide Proserpio in the Journal of Marketing Research.

They explored this question in two ways.

First, they examined over 7 million reviews from the Yelp review website written over a 16-year period about restaurants in Los Angeles and Boston. Over 3 million photos were associated with these reviews.

The authors were interested in several questions. First, does the presence of a photo increase the helpfulness of a review (as measured by the number of votes the review received on the site)? Second, does the similarity in content between the photo and the text of the review improve the value of the photo? Third, what is the mechanism for the influence of the photo on helpfulness?

Overall, reviews with photos received more helpful votes than reviews without photos. Using artificial intelligence (AI), the authors analyzed the content of the reviews and the content of the photos. When the content of the photos and reviews was similar, the review received more helpful votes than when the content of the photos and the reviews was dissimilar.

So, why does this happen?

In several other studies, the researchers explored the idea that the similarity between the photos and the review's content makes the review easier to process, which increases people's sense that the review was helpful.

In a variety of studies, participants were shown reviews in which the photos did or did not match the content. They were asked to judge the helpfulness of the review, the similarity of the content of the review and the photo and also how easy it was to think about the review. In these studies, they replicated the idea that reviews with photos depicting similar content were more helpful than reviews with photos depicting dissimilar content. Further, they found that people thought the reviews with similar photos were easier to think about than reviews with dissimilar photos. Statistical analysis also suggested that the effect of similarity between the photo and review on helpfulness was well explained by the ease of processing the review.

As one other demonstration of this relationship, making the review harder to read by making the font harder to read eliminated the impact of similarity between the content of the review and the content of the photo on the perceived helpfulness of the review. That is, when the review was difficult to process, having a similar photo no longer mattered.

These findings suggest that there is real value in including photos in reviews because it can make the reviews easier for people to read and, therefore, more helpful. If you are going to include a photo in the review, though, you want to make sure that the review discusses the same things that you depicted in the photo.