Listen to Your Users? Self-Selection in User Community Feedback and Commercial Impact
Incorporating user community feedback can hurt commercial success when community members self-select, e.g. for niche-targeted PC games.
Summary
The paper theorises that feedback volunteered by a self-selected user community can mislead a firm, because the community's narrow preferences may differ from mainstream demand. Testing this in PC video games, the authors find that incorporating community feedback can hurt commercial success when the community is self-selected, for example when the game targets a niche. The users who speak up are not a sample of the market, so acting on their feedback can pull a product away from the customers who buy it.
Editor's opinion
The customers who give feedback are not the customers who buy: an active user community is self-selected and can pull a product towards its own narrow tastes. Firms should weigh community input against evidence of the wider market, particularly when the community is small and passionate.
Key concepts
user communities · self-selection · product development · commercial performance