I was reading this article in The New York Times this morning, which talks about how Zagat Survey has thus far missed out on the web and has lost market share to the likes of Yelp. Their response to charge for their apps puzzles me and I don’t think that’s going to work out at all for them, but time will tell. The best quote from this piece is:
“Established companies rarely innovate well no matter what field you’re in,” says Merrill Brown, a media consultant and former executive at MSNBC.com and Court TV.
As with a lot of articles in that paper, it felt like it was just on the verge of making a really good point, but didn’t quite get there.
One of the great things about the Zagat brand is that I trust their reviews. For whatever reason, I think that the reviews come from people who like the same things I like, and don’t like. Which is precisely why I don’t use or trust Yelp. Actually there are a couple of other reasons, not the least of which is that I don’t like the asterisk at the end of their name, that contributes to its untrustworthy-ness.
A friend of mine once said that the reviews are all going to trend toward 3.5 stars, because a bunch of the friends of the owner will give it five stars, some competitors will give it one star, one person will give it two stars because they didn’t like the color of the table cloth (or an equivalently stupid reason to give a place a bad review) and so on. No trust in the sources.
So what’s the solution? Netflix.
Netflix?
As much as I have written about Netflix, no, I don’t think they are the answer to all of the problems in the World.
Netflix has trained me to believe I am unique and special and that I have unique tastes for all sorts of movies and content. If you look at the image to the left, you can see that for this film (which I saw and liked much less than the original), the average person out there that has reviewed the movie gave it 3.8 stars, but based on my historical feedback, they think I will like it a little bit more than that. Nine times out of ten they are correct about this because I have given them a lot of feedback on all sorts of movies and shows.
That’s what is missing in the review business.
I have a very specific and wide range in tastes, from the bagels I like, to the hot dogs I like, to the fine wine I like, to the seafood I don’t like to order in restaurants (I never order crab in a restaurant).
As soon as there’s a review site that collects my feedback and can credibly send me to places they know I am going to like, I will sign up.
That said, I still trust Zagat much more than Yelp, but I am unwilling to pay for the service. I think it’s a bit like OpenTable, if I am going to provide my feedback, I shouldn’t have to pay for that. So while I think Zagat still has some course correction to do, for now I trust them, but I would trust them more if they would follow the lead from Netflix and make it more about me. And you.
That’s the rethinking that I think needs to go on in the world of reviews, and if Yelp already does that or something like that, let me know – I haven’t used it in so long, it’s entirely possible – and if they do, I will amend this post, or at least put an asterisk on it.
-Ric
Leave a Reply