So you see this new gadget that your dying to have, but you’re worried that it might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. You need to know if it’s worth the investment before you cough up the cash. You can’t ask your friends because their living the stone-age when it comes to the latest tech, and you don’t trust professional reviewers because their unwarranted glorification of all things Apple has left you skeptical. Who do you turn to? An In-Home Product Tester of course! They are just like you and me, ordinary people, imparting their experience with a new product that they’ve just laid their hands on. Seemingly reliable information. But is it really?
Companies send their products out to these testers for free in return for a video review planted on the web (most often on YouTube). Most testers get into this business not because they have an eccentric affinity towards testing tech, but because they just want the free stuff. And as all they want is new gear, they seldom bite the hand that feeds them. You very rarely come across a review that completely bashes a product. Cause let’s face it, if a nineteen year old flamed the new gadget your company has been on for the last five years, you aren’t going to send him other stuff anytime soon. So these testers have a great incentive to keep things tempered; no one is going to voluntarily surrender their product to negative marketing.
This said, testers can’t just glorify all products they get their hands on to try and get companies to send them even more stuff. The public isn’t dim-witted, they would catch on, and that tester would quickly lose credibility. What the testers need to do is to strike a balance. One that avoids being overly critical of a products fault, but at the same time does not needlessly glorify it. How to do this while still being imparting something useful to the public? This is the serial tester’s dilemma.
Thoughts?
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