Tech gadgets and, where applicable, their respective operating systems have a significant impact on our everyday lives. The kind of laptop, tablet and especially smartphone we use, decide how we interact with the digital world at all times. These gadgets, of course, differ wildly across different brands, but even within the same brand, new hardware and software features are added usually yearly, which further increases the variety of the available tech. This makes deciding on which gadget to buy and when to upgrade from old tech increasingly tricky. It is impossible to test every phone extensively for an extended period before making the purchase decision. Therefore, potential buyers of those gadgets have to trust the opinions of others, who have been using these products already.
One way of getting these opinions is by looking at user-generated reviews like on Amazon. An alternative, which this blog article focuses on, is trusting dedicated tech reviews from selected tech influencers, like Marques Brownlee or Linus Sebastian (two of my personal favourites). These content creators aim to provide an unbiased first look and subsequently a review of various tech products, which can either help make a purchase decision or, if the quality of the content is high enough, can be watched or read by tech enthusiasts for pleasure. Some of these tech influencers have amassed a considerable following, like the YouTube channel unbox therapy, which has over 17 million subscribers. Tech companies have of course noticed the increasing popularity of these types of YouTube channels and try to leverage the influencers reach for their benefit, by for example sending early review units before launch or inviting the creators to product events. The goal of these brands is to put out their product in front of the influencer’s audience and hopefully get a positive review, as many people (me included) base their buying decisions on the opinions of these review channels.
In today’s world, many potential buyers want to get their product as soon as possible after launch (or even on launch day), and they expect to see these reviews beforehand. This means, the reviewers are depended to be invited to these sales events or even get an early free review unit sent by the tech company, as otherwise, they can only publish their review long after the “hype” is over and therefore will not reach the desired audience reach. Companies have no obligation to send review units to anybody and therefore could refuse to do so if, for example, the reviewer has made negative comments about another product of that brand in the past. This can lead to tech influencers being biased, which opinions they can or cannot say publicly, as a negative review might impact them negatively later on. As such, not every reviewer can be trusted per se. Viewers must view the opinions voiced very critically and check to the reviewers track record. If the influencer has made negative comments about a product of a certain company in the past, but still receives early review units, it increases the trustworthiness of the reviewer (and the company). Furthermore, one should not trust one single source of truth and try to get as many opinions as possible, including the above-mentioned user-generated reviews.
In conclusion, there will never be a perfect way of finding out if a product matches the expectations, especially in long-term use, but the combination of finding trustworthy reviewers, checking user-generated reviews and if possible, trying out the gadget yourself, can help one to make the most educated purchasing decision. But even with these guidelines, spending more than 1000€ on a smartphone, at least for me, still induces FOMO (Fear of missing out).
First of all, I like your article and it’s an interesting and current hot topic. You exposed the lobbying that these companies use to bias the vloggers very clearly and it’s definitely something that annoys me personally as well.
I agree that the marketing of these companies is getting better and better, and they have found ways to manipulate our purchasing behaviour by abusing simple human psychology. Companies have been doing this for ever, people never used to buy an engagement ring until De Beers created advertisements that would shame you if you wouldn’t buy it and there are many more examples. On the other side you have these big companies who are constantly lobbying and are even getting their way through the funding of certain political campaigns (USA..). This is not just something of the present, it has been here and it will always be here.
What I mean to say is that people should always take these marketing tricks, advertisements and “reviewers” with a grain of salt. If you really want to know if a product fits your expectations, check all the specifications and just try out a select group of products. I hope that one day people will realize that the hype might not be the best to go. Of course it is impossible to check every product, but it’s not possible to make perfect decisions every time you buy something either. Skip the hype and focus on facts and you will probably end up with a good quality product, which satisfies your needs 🙂