How Do Yelp Reviews Shape Our Choices?

Behavior change is hard. Actively changing another person's behavior is even harder. But there are plenty of companies out there that have been able to crack that code. They understand that people don't always or even rarely act rationally. I'm Kristen Berman, co founder of Irrational Labs. Over the years, we've helped countless companies understand and leverage behavioral science to increase the health, wealth and happiness of their users. The idea behind the Science of Change was to create a podcast that demystifies the psychology of decision making. So here's how it works. Each week I get to chat with visionary product and organizational leaders to uncover their insights about user behavior and how they've managed to change it. I mash this up with some of the latest research in the field to get to the bottom of our core psychologies. So let's dive in and unlock the secrets behind the science of change. The Science of Change podcast is presented by Setsale, the world's number one revenue execution platform. Believe it or not, word of mouth communication is still one of the most powerful sources of information shaping consumer behavior. One study suggests that word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions and generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising. We trust recommendations from family, friends, and even strangers before we trust commercials. That's why I was super excited to talk to my guest today. Akhil Kuduvali Ramesh Akil is the VP of Product at Yelp, so needless to say, he knows a little something about word of mouth recommendations since they are literally what drives his product. Yelp amplifies the power of word of mouth communication by allowing strangers to exchange information and stories about their experiences with various businesses and services. So even with all the competing platforms businesses can use to get our attention, Yelp figured out from the beginning that people trust people more than they trust just about anything else. That's why their reviews based app has been so influential in changing the way businesses and customers interact. Let's get started. So we'll dive right in what has worked or not worked for Yelp to drive reviews, which is what Yelp is most or a lot known for.

Yeah, you know, as you'd expect, there's no shortage of experiments we've run in understanding that psychology and making improvements there about things that have worked. Maybe I can start with a few things. You know, imagine you're trying to get a roof and you just hired a roofer on Yelp asking for review the day number two of you. Hiring a roofer never really helps. You've not even finished the gig yet, you know, they've not come and fixed your problem. So what doesn't work is reminding people to write a review the wrong times. Maybe you went to a coffee shop the last night and you came back the next day and there the timing works, right? So, but a roofer, it doesn't. So we've got to get the timing of the reminder of, hey, looks like you had a good experience or looks like you interacted with the business. Write a review. That reminder has to be at the right time. So that's something we've observed plays a really good, really important role. Let's say you're writing the review and something that you'll see in the app today, actually that's out there, is what we call system prompts. You know, writing reviews on a blank screen and yelp as a system will say, hey, maybe you should talk a little bit about the ambiance. Or they'll say, you're on a roll now, your review looks great. So these kinds of encouragements that come in in the prompt we know helps. Writing reviews also makes it a bit more fun, you know, so there's a lot of encouragement from the system prompt. Small thing, but it matters. The third thing I'd say, you know, we've observed this and we have lots of numbers that tell us this. That thank you note from the biz owner will go a long way. And this is one of the reasons why, like, why people write reviews is because they want to help their community, really encourage the biz owner. So when they get a thank you note from the business owner, it really matters to them and they'll continue their habits. So these are some examples of what have worked and for what's not worked. As I said, badly timed reminders will fail. I'm in the middle of a meeting, I get pinged to write a review. You know, it's just a bad, you know, these things. The right nudge at the right time matters a lot. So the science of getting that right is important.

This is something we've heard before. Timing matters. Jem from Duolingo taught us that if.

You use Duolingo today, anything we send you for the next seven days is basically what we call a practice reminder. It says, come back to Duolingo. Practice Spanish. We schedule those pretty strategically to be exactly 23 and a half hours later after you've done a lesson today. And we've experimented many different time lengths before, and that was always the winner. And it's the intuitive reason that, for example, your schedule allows you to mainly practice in the morning and then your practice takes somewhere from 10 to 30 minutes. If we schedule the notification in 23 and a half hours later, it's probably going to trigger at the right spot where you have free time to practice.

And maybe we double click on that. So what is the right time? You said it's not right after something happens, but can you say more about how you figured out the opportune timing?

Yeah, I mean, without actually laying out answers, you know, naturally, running a bunch of experiments and understanding different projects or on the services end, we think of them as projects and these projects have different time durations. You're waiting for a locksmith, hopefully you're not waiting for a locksmith an entire week, but for a landscaper you might as well. So we know the average project durations, if you will, you know, so we use those to determine some of the optimal times. We've also observed that our avid review writers have patterns and their personal patterns. And so these patterns tend to be something that the reminder should map to. So you might have a long commute from Oakland to the Bay Area over the bridge, stuck in traffic. And this might be a moment when you, when you think about your experiences and write a review. And that's something we've learned. We'll try to say, okay, that's, that's your habit. Let's kind of, you know, appropriately remind you when you're in that, in that mode. So these are the, these are some examples of it.

And how much do you nag people? So in general we can formally call them reminders, but are you asking people once to do it and then if they don't do it, saying not for you, are you asking them twice?

We have definitely taken the philosophy of not nagging people. So this is a reminder is what it is. When a reminder turns into a nagging situation, then you either got the timing wrong or you're just reminded somebody way too often. And at the end of the day, a review has to be written because of intrinsic reasons. So for us, we, of course there's a whole network effect to this. Right. And we don't have to send 15 push notifications or something like this to get one review. That's not what we're trying to do. The app itself has different reminder UX modules. There are celebration emails that go out, which has some subtle reminders, but they're all different intensity of nudges, you know, they all are not. Nobody will perceive a thank you note in an email with some suggestions at the Bottom as a nagging thing, you know, so we've definitely ensured that this is a. There's a network effect at play here. And it's not just us reminding people every day to do something.

Why do people write reviews? One reason why we like to share by word of mouth, or in Yelp's case, one reason we leave reviews is to shape the impressions others have of us. We like people to see us in a positive light. So. So just like the clothes we wear or the music we like, what we talk about and what we say is driven by how we want to be seen. Looking at restaurant reviews in six different cities, researchers found that frequent Yelp contributors are typically looking to qualify for elite status, which distinguishes users who write high quality reviews for a variety of restaurants. So this quest for elite status drives people to review a variety of restaurants. Interestingly, restaurants with higher price levels, higher uniqueness levels, and a larger percentage of elite reviews tend to obtain more reviews sooner than other restaurants. People review restaurants more when they convey status, confirming this idea that we are writing reviews not just for other people, but to signal something about ourselves. And what is the balance of positive and negative reviews? Who's more likely to to review? We kind of have the, the age old idea that those angry people are more likely to review. Does it actually pan out?

That actually does not. That's absolutely incorrect. As I said, most people write reviews because they really want to help the community and encourage the biz owner, you know, and so they're, they're happy when they're writing the review. As set, over 3/4 of our reviews are over 3 stars. Majority of our reviews are actually 5 star reviews. That alone says everything right. If majority are five stars, that throws away this angry reviewer. So there's a lot of positivity that's flowing through the marketplace.

Actually, research suggests that reviews for most products and services tend to concentrate around extreme ends. In other words, reviews tend to be their one star or five stars. There are very few in the middle. Why is that? Wharton marketing scholar Jonah Berger suggests that it has to do with arousal. When we're physiologically aroused, we're more likely to share information with others. In one study, participants watched videos that were designed to elicit either high or low emotion. Everyone then performed a second unrelated task. They read an otherwise emotionally neutral article and then rated how willing they were to share that article with friends, family, and co workers. What Berger found was that people were more likely to share information after watching videos that triggered a higher emotion than a lower one, independent of whether that emotion was positive or negative. The takeaway people are more likely to pay attention to and share experiences that are extremely positive or extremely negative. So bringing it back to Yelp, you'll probably see more reviews if someone loved a restaurant or hated it. So your hypothesis there is people are writing reviews because they like the business, and so businesses that have higher quantity is also a signal for their quality. Is that the connection?

Yeah, I mean, it's not just that. The main connection I think here is that it may be true that a negative review plays on your mind a lot more if you're a biz owner, but if you focus on doing what you're really good at, which is serving your consumers, that'll get represented on Yelp. So it's a matter of patience. You know, by the time you get four and five reviews, how you treat your consumers will start to show. So that's the important takeaway, I think. And the other important takeaway is really true that most people are out there pining for a new business to work out, and they'll do what they need to to help that, you know, and that's why they write reviews.

But back to the quantity question. Is there a magic number? So I'm scrolling, looking for my restaurant for tonight. If a business has under 10 reviews, should I pass it up and go for the trusted source? How should one make this decision?

Yeah, you know, I think we've done some research around this about the quantity itself that we've put out. I think it's in our blogs. But just talking about the consumer behavior, you know, the quantity doesn't quite matter that we know as much as quality does. If you've got, say, five reviews of good quality, of depth in it, that'll convince a consumer to choose you. So we know that five is sort of a mental leap. Okay, if there's three or four good ones, that's still great. But five, there's a mental note there. But if they're just ratings, without a review, you might get 30 of them, but you'll still not instill the confidence in the consumer. So really, the question we should be asking is, how many quality reviews, and are they enough to instill confidence in the consumer? You know, some of our blog posts and other things, we'll talk about it. There is no magic number. But FI seems to be, you know, a thing that consumers care about.

Akil is right. Increasing confidence in consumers seems to be the key in driving consumer choices. A paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research suggests that reviews that express certainty and confidence in choices are more persuasive. Researchers in another study analyzed more than a thousand book reviews and discovered that compared to language that merely implied endorsement, such as I liked it or I enjoyed it, phrases like I recommend it were more persuasive and made readers more likely to buy it. This is because overt recommendation gives the perception that the reviewer has expertise, which gives the reader more confidence in choosing it. And so, with the kind of push or I think probably small businesses know the importance of their reputation on Yelp, one could imagine that friends and family are providing some of these first reviews. How does Yelp think about this conundrum or problem of that you've created? People want reviews. It's so important. There's some small dishonesties out there.

Yeah. You know, we have strict policies around it, and these policies are. I really wish that new business owners understand these policies. And, you know, they're there to promote goodwill in the marketplace. And we've written a lot about it. So these policies do request people to not business owners to not solicit reviews, no matter who they're soliciting from. And, you know, this is important because the reviews flow in organically. And it's back to that notion that as long as you're serving your consumers, the consumers will do the rest because they really want you to win. And it's a matter of patience. And sometimes people ask, you know, hey, then what can I do? I'm doing everything to get my business to work. Two things really come to mind, actually. One is serve your consumers and please be patient. The other thing is respond to the reviews no matter what the ratings are. You know, I think we've seen that a very healthy portion of consumers will actually update the reviews. Will go try the place again when update the reviews. Once the biz owner has started a conversation or responded to their review and Yelp. So these are two active things Bizoners should be doing. Goes back to that notion that most people are having an experience and they're thankful that that experience is provided by another person, another human. And sometimes things can slip here and there, but most of the times, if someone listens to it and says things will get better and they do get better, they'll try it again. You know. Yeah, this human connection across the entity of a business is important.

And maybe you can touch on something else that felt like you're promoting the human connection, which is pushing people to write longer reviews. How do you actually push them to either keep going or say more?

Yeah. On Yelp, you Can't even leave a rating without a review. So you have to write a review. It's a system based constraint. So you can't just go five stars, have nothing to say. You just cannot do that. And on top of that, we have a minimum character limit threshold as well, which is a part of the system. So the system just does not accept reviews under a certain threshold. So we have a certain. We're making a certain statement when we say that. Right. So we're saying, look, rewriting takes effort, and it's valuable because of the effort somebody has put in and that effort comes through. You know, when you read a review, you'll feed the effort that it took because, you know, as a consumer, you couldn't. You don't have always the time to go do all that. So you kind of appreciate the effort somebody took. And that's the human connection. Right. A lot of the times the perception of effort is very important. You know, actually, I have a funny research paper I was. It's very relevant to this. I was reading this yesterday, actually, where I learned that parents, when a caregiving product tells them, hey, this will take zero effort for you to do, they kind of don't want that. They don't even trust it. They're like, look, I'm giving care. I want it to be. I want to put effort in it, you know, so this is not about effortlessness. This is about me having more time to put the effort. So that effort, when mimicked, is a better effort. You know, when the effort shows through the platform, other people can feel it, you know, so it's really important that the system upholds that effort and make sure that, that, that we're keeping that standard, that someone's writing a review is putting an effort, and that's why it's valuable.

That's a very nice outward signal that they went to the restaurant, they thought deeply about it, they came with thoughts, they came prepared. Okay, let's change tax a little bit and think about when you're searching for a business. So as me as a consumer coming in to do this search process, Yelp has variety. You can find an ice cream place or you could find a roofer like there. There's something for everyone here, which I could imagine as building a product or trying to figure out how you customize the search process for each one is difficult. What are the differences between the types of I need to find an ice cream place tonight versus I need to find a rebottle for my kitchen?

Yeah, they're two very different things. Isn't it? We actually think of it as two different verticals. So when it comes to ice cream or restaurants or you are trying to find a place for a quick drink, we think of those as high frequency, low risk experiences. So we expect the mental model of the consumer to be very different compared to someone, someone who's finding a roofer or a locksmith, where it's a high risk, low frequency mental model. So our approach is definitely based on that. And a lot of times the ice cream place that you're looking for, you want it to be right around you. And you're most likely going to the ice cream place. Right. So physically you're jumping on your bike or, you know, car and driving there. That's not necessarily the case with roofers, for example, because most of the roofers who consult with you will come to you. So the whole parameters based on which you rank businesses start to change because not only the mental model is different, the way you interact is very, very different as well. And if you look at services, we think of them, you could sort of largely put them in two buckets. One of them, I'd say, is a landscaper, where you sort of plan ahead for months. So it's more a discovery process. Slow the latency for when you think of fixing your front yard to when you fix it, the decisions you make. And the discovery process takes some time, so you're planning towards it. But that's totally different with urgent use cases. Somebody broke into your car, your window's down, your tires punctured, or you were locked out of your house, you need service right now, within hours. So again, mentally, the way you approach, the consumer approaches, it's totally different. So we try to build and rank businesses completely differently for these use cases.

And so maybe we take the first use case, which is this kind of higher frequency, low risk behavior. How do we get people to try something new? I think in life, many times we're probably doing the same thing. We're going to the same ice cream shop we like, we're visiting the same dry cleaners. And yet there can be some small improvements from trying something new. So is there any ways you found to get folks out of their comfort zone and to try that new ice cream shop?

Yeah, I mean, I think people would be very open to try lots of ice cream shops.

Fair ice cream may not be the best example.

You're totally right. I think ice cream shops is unique in that way. But you're right, you know, people do have preferences and habits, for sure. You know, A product that comes to my mind definitely is Spotify, I think does a brilliant job of recommending music to me that's sort of close enough to my preferences, but does take a little bit of a detour from my usual playlist. So it's sort of an affinity based diversification. So that's the key with us too. You know, we might know that you like Thai food or Vietnamese food, and we know because of our taxonomy and other things like this that Ethiopian food or Indian food is similar but different. So we'll sort of nudge you towards a small diversification from your path. You know, that small step is what we focus on because that opens up new doors.

If you've ever enjoyed a Spotify recommendation for a new song or artist, you can appreciate what Akil is saying. Spotify uses a machine learning tool called Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search algorithm to group songs and users together based on shared attributes or qualities. Basically, they're recommending things that are close to what you already like. But what Spotify really wants is to expand your tastes into new genres. But they can't migrate you from EDM to gospel right away. So how is Spotify trying to do this? Well, their in house researchers looked at the entire streaming history of 100,000 users. Then they grouped their music preferences into micro genres and map them across time. What they came up with was a connected graph that illustrated the transitions between different genres of music. For example, their model suggested that going from liking EDM to gospel, users were likely to pass through a few phase of liking Tropical House, a chill but upbeat electronic music. So Spotify hopes that they can gradually acclimate users to different genres by taking them through micro genres that lie in between what they already like and what they don't yet know. Just as Yelp tries to steer us from tacos to poke. Okay, now I'm going to ask what are the other top food groups? So there's pizza. Are there other.

Yeah, the ones you would imagine. Right, the ones you'd imagine. You know, pizza, sushi, burritos and tacos. Definitely Mexican food, Chinese takeout food. All these things are definitely large, average behaviors that we've seen across the country.

Yeah. This is probably good for folks who are planners to know because they're usually deciding on behalf of a group. And so you could imagine if you're deciding on behalf of a group, should you get Thai food or should you get burritos? And maybe from this you'd push people towards burritos.

Yeah, you know, that's such an important this is the part of the active thing I was trying to say, right, Going out and eating such a social phenomenon. And so you have to actively plan, you have to be actively a part of this. You have to consider your friend's dietary preference, for example. So these things are the reason why the app has to respond to very contextual questions or contextual asks.

Maybe we talk about those small kind of contextual differences. So you can imagine people seeing a menu popped open versus you have to click on it. Ordering effects is something on the top of a list versus the bottom. What has worked to drive people to kind of engage with the list after a search? A recent paper on Yelp's restaurant reviews noted that most users spend only about five minutes on the app and only read up to five reviews while browsing no more than eight pages before making a decision. This means people don't spend too much effort diving into endless choices. So the choices and reviews users see within those limited ranges have a powerful impact on their choices. Which means how Yelp's algorithm arranges the order of those options and reviews are key drivers in users decision making.

Yeah, it's a really cool question. So maybe some of the small things. I can think of one of them, definitely you brought up takeout. So this comes to mind. We did a pretty simple thing on the home screen of the app where we would basically say, look, you've ordered takeout and Yelp before and you've ordered this specific sort of arrangement of food items from this particular place. We know that if you've done that and takeout particular is a repeat habit behavior. You know, on Thursdays, if you love that one particular takeout thing on next time when you think of takeout, you want to try that again. So we want to make that very easy for you. So it's a big convenience. Reduce logistical friction. Don't let these are think anymore. Here's the last time food that you ordered one button. Everything else just happens. You know, you hit that one button, say reorder, the entire thing just, you know, happens after that one click. So this was a simple thing where we just made it very easy for people to reorder the same takeout or delivery that they did before. So there was one of them I could think of the other one putting into your nudges. Question of diversification, you know, very simple thing. If you use the app, one of our filters that's pretty famous, or even one of the annotations in a SERP cell, it's a very simple small annotation. It says hot and new. So when, when people are searching for a coffee shop, they go, oh, there's a hot and new coffee shop. We gotta go try that for sure. So that's another simple nudge, you know, and that's something people love and respond to. We've seen that and propagated that.

Have you tried other little labels?

Yeah, absolutely. There's, there's, you know, on the services front, actually we have this feature called Biz Highlights. What these highlights do is we have selected a few of these nudges or these, these annotations that businesses can claim and showcase. And they're very focused on these decision points, as you call them, because, you know, they can say, look, I've been in business, I'm a family owned business, been in business for 28 years. So when you're looking at a service provider, you know, this is a trust play, right? I mean, if they. So that really helps. And that's a part of your consideration. So that's really important. So we surface that. You'll see that in the app. You know, another one is, I'm sure we'll, we'll hit on this later too. If we get into the services part is we surface response times. When you're stressed and you want your leaky faucet fixed, you want to pick a person who usually responds to requests fast. So we surface that information on search as well. So, yeah, as you use the app, we think of these things very closely.

Okay, we'll actually switch two services per your suggestion. So basically you said there are two types of verticals. One is this high frequency, lower risk. And then there's obviously the lower frequency, maybe higher risk where you've got your roofer, your kitchen remodel. These are kind of the pros, if you will, on Yelp. Maybe you can describe the flow. I'm going in. I request a quote from multiple businesses. How does that actually work and what have you learned from designing that process?

It's a feature that's been absolutely loved by people. It gets used a lot on the platform. We've learned a lot of things over time. And, you know, the thing with response times is a big one. You know, that's something that the second you search for, let's say a plumber, you'll see with requests, the request, no code experience. What's really important is while consumers are trying to figure out who to hire, it's a human decision at the end of the day. Right. You've already kind of done, done your work. You've Kind of said, okay, this person seems like might know my, my area or neighborhood. Reviews and ratings are already decent and pretty good. Let me reach out to a couple of them. From there on, that conversation should be fluid and can influence the decision a lot. And one of the key things is how responsive a person is or how responsive a business owner is to the consumer. And we learned pretty quickly that given how important it is, we need to build that feature into request a quote itself and how we surface it. So that became how often does the business owner respond and how soon do they respond became so important. We wanted to just make sure the marketplace is aware that it's very important. So we highlighted that. The other thing, you know, there are other things we've learned along the way. We've also learned that if you, let's say, want to instill a heated floor, then this heated floor doesn't require just a flooring person, but also requires an H Vac person might require, depending on the kind of electricity work that you're doing. An electrician too. And so when we understand and ask questions during the flow of requesting a quote, we have to be clever in asking what type of work are you trying to do? And balancing the right type of questions. But not asking too many questions is important because it becomes a friction heavy flow. So you have to balance every question for information that's so important. So those are the kinds of updates that we really care about. Because at the end of the day, the plumber is going to get this request from a consumer. They're going to have to decide if it's worth their time or if there's enough complication here or if it's going to be too complicated for them for, you know, things like that. Sometimes they also have to understand if they do. I might be a flooring services professional, but I don't maybe I don't do heated floorings. So these kinds of specific things and specific information that has to flow through the product becomes very important. So, so lots of learnings over time in this space.

How transparent are you with the customer on this? Because you could imagine one reason people wouldn't want to submit a quote is they're nervous that you don't have that number. You know, that, oh, I'm going to get spammed with all these people. And so what do you do to ease that uncertainty?

We think and care about this a lot. So there's firstly, you know, the consumer's got the choice, so we kind of give the consumer the control. We kind of say hey, do you want more quotes or do you not want more quotes? But in most places, we do recommend more quotes because we know that we're not sharing PII information as a platform. We're not doing that. So basically we do tell the consumer, look, we're not sharing your phone number with anybody. So it's all going to be in the platform. And if you want to give your number to them, you can use the platform to give your number to them. But we're not doing that automatically.

So you're basically kind of giving some confidence level that you're. And in a marketplace, you do this, you're in it for both people. You're protecting the consumer, you're helping the pro. You're kind of playing the middleman here and reminding people about that one thing is generally the an ordering effect thing. So basically, if you, if you tell me five pros, and it's great, you know, I should basically, in theory, in a perfect world, I would call five of them. By the way, most people, if you're listening, you should always get five bank quotes for your mortgage. This is where we get under quotes. But, you know, yeah, because you could really negotiate an interest rate for floor remodels or whatnot. It's unclear how many I should actually get. If you give me five, should I get three? And so one hypothesis is that the order you give me them in matters, but correct me what actually matters with who I give a call to.

I think there are different ways to solve these, I guess, these questions or these sources of stress. Right. Am I getting the right price is a source of stress for most people when it comes to a big ticket item around the home, even at your car, probably. So, you know, there's other ways to do this. And we have published our cost guides which help tell people, look, on average, this is the distribution of the costs. So you know, when you get the cost back at some level, you have a sense for what the distribution is. So that's one way to kind of say, okay, look, you, you don't have to go comparison shopping endlessly. You know, it's a, you know, sometimes when I order stuff on Amazon, I'm going to, could I have gotten it for cheaper? But that question is what we're hoping to just settle or answer, just liberate that question. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is lots of reviews have been. Have this information. Right. Lots of people have actually come out and told us for the value of the service they provide. They're really well priced. So we can say that, you know, if you're looking for a plumber, I can say this person, look, 30 people have said they have great value for price. That'll already put you at ease, right? That'll already kind of say, okay, look, I'm not getting skimmed or, you know, no one's ripping me off here. So I think there's different ways to resolve that question. And it's one definitely, that we've thought about deeply. But we want to absolutely make sure that we recommend, you know, in our flows to go get quotes from more than one person. For sure. It's the right thing. It's a smart thing to do.

I think maybe a macro question. You know, Yelp has done a fair amount of kind of expansion in target markets for. From the plain restaurant searches to accountants to kitchen remodels, the mental model of Yelp over the years has changed from this ice cream shop to the pro. How have you guys gone about doing that or getting consumers to come to Yelp for something wildly different than ice cream?

So one way of thinking about it is a lot of our users care about quality. That's why they use the app, because they want to make sure they're picking a new place that's good. So you can imagine that a lot of folks using the app tend to have a car, tend to live in places where they care about the quality of the place they live in, the quality and the health of their car. They care for these things. So what that means is, let's say you open the home screen, you're about to hit the restaurant's icon to go find dinner for tonight. We've done things like place the plumber's icon on that home screen just as a way of saying, look, we do plumbers, too, and it's right here, just one click away. And we don't necessarily expect that one thing to change everything, right? But consumers know in their minds, wait, if Yelp does plumbers, do they do accountants too? Maybe they do. It's a simple leap. It's not a big leap. You know, it's a small leap. So all you have to open the door for is that first leap and make sure the entire network effects across the board, not just the home screen, is trying to attempt to open the door for that leap. So that's been our approach to it, and in many ways it's worked.

It's a fair amount of implicit signaling. So you're basically kind of signaling to people that you're more than what they think you are. These small copy and icons.

Yeah, totally. And you know, it's often even allowing the consumers to do a little bit of their own association as well. You know, it's like the ones I just talked about. If you just put on an icon for auto repair, it's not. Is it really such a big leap to go to accountants? You know, so there's those. Life we know given Yelp is relevant to so much of a person's life. Life's use cases are all connected. And so as long as we, we can open the door for it and signal it, I think the, the network effects after that will take over.

That's a nice mantra. Life's use case. Life is all connected. So why do people go to Starbucks instead of the local coffee shop? Brand names give people an experience they can rely on. No matter where you are at Starbucks, at Target, you know what you are going to get. We don't like uncertainty, so trying something new is hard. At the macro level, Yelp reviews reduce that uncertainty we have around trying new things. Data from 2011 suggests that a one star increase in a rating leads to a 5 to 9% increase in revenue. This effect is driven by independent restaurants. I know I'm more confident trying a new restaurant when other people have verified it's worth trying. So this gives small businesses a shot against the big guys. But over time, this is also something we should worry about. As Yelp grows, the businesses with more reviews and higher reviews will have an easier time. If you're just starting a pizza shop and have four reviews, you your pizza could be awesome, but you won't gain the traction, at least not from Yelp. And that could quickly kill your business. The name of the game with Yelp will be moderating a marketplace that reduces uncertainty and helps people try new things, all while trying to avoid a cluster at the top. So how to do this and kill was onto something with the idea of encouraging longer and more meaningful reviews. Star reviews give less information than formal written reviews. Those stars focus on a positivity scale. Either it's good or it's bad, without context or nuance. One study found that half of all the reviews on both Yelp and Amazon gave the highest possible rating, which doesn't square with actual human behavior. In practice, we're more discerning than that. The researchers call this the positivity problem. In other words, star ratings are usually an unreliable predictor of quality on either end of the scale. The hack read the actual written review. One group of researchers looked at the emotionality of reviews versus star ratings and used computational linguistics to understand the reviewer's intent. When looking at the emotionality of reviews, they were able to predict the box office revenue of nearly 2,400 movies, sales of 1.6 million books, and real world reservations at over 1,000 restaurants. Star ratings, on the other hand, were a more unreliable predictor of success. So next time you use Yelp, make sure to read the reviews versus just looking at the star ratings. Whether you decide to try that pizza joint or not, you'll have more information to make the best possible decision for you. The Science of Change podcast is presented by Set Sale. Act on the moments to lead to a sale. Visit them at Setsale co or on LinkedIn to learn more about the world's number one revenue execution platform. If you like behavioral science and want to learn how you can apply it to your work, head to irrationallabs.com we have a variety of courses available. Use discount code podcast for 20% off this podcast is produced by Irrational Labs and StudioPod Media. Our executive producer is Rachel Roberts. All episodes are written by me, Kristen Berman and Ying Lin, with expert script editing by Jack Buer. Special thanks to Lydia Troup for fact checking and citations.