PowerReviews works with more than 1,000 global brands and retailers to help them collect, display and analyze user-generated content – Ratings and Reviews, Questions and Answers, and images and videos – on their websites.
As more consumers flocked online as a result of Covid, this content actually became significantly more important on the shopping journey. Shoppers now rely on it to make smart buying decisions more than at any point in history – because it’s impartial, accurate and provides insights on products they can’t see, touch or ask a real-life store associate about.
As a result, they help brands and retailers sell more products (online and increasingly in store) and – through the analysis of the consumer insights provided within this content – improve both those products themselves and the marketing of those products.
The data unquestionably backs this up and really underlines the value: Consumers who interact with Ratings and Reviews on a product page on an e-commerce website go on to purchase the item at 120.3% the rate of those who don’t; respective figure for Q&A is 157.1% and imagery is 91.4%.
The firm has actually been a mainstay of the Chicago tech scene since 2005. Most recently, PowerReviews has been synonymous with the name of Chicago stalwart Matt Moog, but he stepped aside in March 2020 to concentrate on other ventures and he remains an active board member.
PowerReviews now has new leadership, with new blood in its CTO/CPO (Joe Henson – former executive of Label Insight, Triad Retail Media and Catalina Marketing) and CFO (Giuliana Summer – who most recently served in the same position scaling customer intelligence firm Signal) positions and under CEO Mark Dillon.
So although the company has always been fundamentally committed to innovation and Moog’s considerable influence will always endure, this transition has brought with it a more specific and dedicated focus.
Most recently, this innovation has been focused on enabling brands and retailers to better analyze the user-generated content they collect – an area PowerReviews has quickly established itself as a genuine market leader.
Powered by a dedicated analytics team, there are two critical elements to this: one is understanding the impact of this content on the shopping experience (i.e. how do customers who end up purchasing interact with user-generated content) and then optimizing accordingly. The other – a so far considerably underutilized use case – is using it as a form of consumer insight on the products themselves.
This second capability – in particular – offers phenomenal potential because it delivers information that has traditionally been either impossible and/or prohibitively expensive for brands and retailers to reach. Previously, these companies would have had to rely on focus groups or surveys to obtain this level of product insight – but neither of these options provides the scale, specificity or combination of qualitative and quantitative that analyzing user-generated content does. Evidence of its power came in PowerReviews winning a deal to benchmark user-generated content with one of the leading CPG brands in the world.
The company is also growing, increasing its workforce by around 20% in 2021 – which includes plans to double the engineering team.
In addition to an ongoing and consistent commitment to innovation, PowerReviews’ success can be largely attributed to its culture. The company considers being customer-first, entrepreneurial and genuinely passionate about what it does as core tenants of what it’s like to work there. The fact that the PowerReviews “shoutout” Slack channel is more active than any other speaks volumes about how much value is placed on empowering colleagues.
But perhaps most importantly, as it states on its website: “PowerReviews aspires to be a kind and uplifting place to work full of energetic, passionate and friendly people. We aim to create an environment where employees can learn, grow and make lifelong friends.
