Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
This customer comment, posted on http://www.StubbsBBQ.com, is really from a customer. If it
weren’t, Stubb’s would be lying, yet we expect companies to post true statements if they are
positive. More difficult to trust are anonymous reviews; we assume they come from real customers,
but that is not always true. And when they aren’t from real customers, the company is guilty of
sugging.
Truly, in no other marketplace should the term caveat emptor apply as strongly as it does on the Internet.
Caveat emptor means, “let the buyer beware,” or “it’s your own fault if you buy it and it doesn’t work!”
Product reviews can be posted by anyone—even by a company or its competitors. So how do you know
which ones to trust? Oftentimes you don’t. Yet many of us do trust them. One study found that over 60
percent of buyers look for online reviews for their most important purchases, including over 45 percent of
senior citizens. [1]
Figure 14.11
Most of us know that you can’t believe everything a salesperson says about a product in a setting like this. But what
about online? Whom can you believe? It’s caveat emptor, or let the buyer beware, there, too!
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
While sugging isn’t illegal, it isn’t fair. Not only is the content potentially misrepresented, but the source
certainly is. As you already know, a marketer cannot make promises about an offering’s capabilities unless
those capabilities are true. Sugging is similar—it involves misrepresenting or lying about the source of the
information in an effort to gain an unfair advantage.