Who reads reviews?

Any modern day consumer has access to tons of information that will help her make a smart decision when buying a product or hiring a service. This is what reviews are for. Customer reviews are made by people who want to share their satisfaction or disappointment towards a service or product.

Here's a good example. I have just watched the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" on DVD. I felt compelled to share my opinion about the movie so I logged in at Amazon.com and wrote a review. I wondered whether the book version (from which the movie was based) was better than the movie. So I checked the reviews. I found out that there were a lot of readers who did not like the book. Something about the main character, how she was portrayed in the book, was completely different from the movie adaptation. Or maybe the author's tone of the writing. Further curious now, I browsed through book online using Amazon.com's "Look Inside" feature. Upon reading the first few pages of the book, I was just as disappointed as most of the people who read the book.

Even someone who doesn't have an Amazon.com account can read the book review of "The Devil Wears Prada". The only question left is whether as consumers, they would be influenced by other people who had previously read the book. There is really no telling whether I was influenced by the reviews or not. And yet I had the feeling that the negative consensus has subliminally affected me. Would I buy the book version of the movie that I liked? Not really.