There was a time when consumer advertising was the most effective tool for persuading customers to buy a particular product or shop a particular store.

Today, however, consumers seeking to make informed (rather than impulsive) purchasing decisions are coming to rely heavily on the opinions of fellow shoppers.

Shannon Glass, director of Internet operations for Limited Brands, was acutely aware of that trend as she searched for a sophisticated marketing tool that could drive traffic to BathandBodyWorks.com and convert browsers into buyers.

As a retailer of “very experiential products that people want to touch and smell before they buy,” Bath & Body Works “needed to find a way to help our online customers overcome hurdles to purchasing,” Glass says. A fair amount of brand-related content already existed on blogs and Internet message boards, she says, but “we wanted to take those things and bring them to our website, where purchasing decisions were being made.” When Bath & Body Works introduces a new fragrance (as it did most recently with Velvet Tuberose),

customers may find it difficult to make a purchasing decision merely by reading the brand’s marketing materials. But if other customers write descriptions of why they loved a particular fragrance and a peer relationship is established, it “lends credibility to the product and its benefits,” Glass says. After interviewing several candidates, Bath & Body Works selected Austin, Texas-based Bazaarvoice, whose online clients include Home Depot, Sears and Macy’s.

Outsourcing (rather than building and maintaining its own e-commerce platform) allowed the solution to be integrated into Bath & Body Works’ hosted platform more quickly and easily. “You need a lot of moderation to fully leverage a customer review solution and to get the reviews up in a timely manner, so we needed someone who could provide a full-service offering to us,” Glass says. Working with a dedicated Bazaarvoice associate, Bath & Body Works commenced implementation of Bazaarvoice eCommerce Ratings and Reviews in February 2007 and went live with it three months later. All the technology is hosted by Bazaarvoice, which “significantly reduced our development time,” says Glass. “We just had to customize it to our brand’s needs.” After Bath & Body Works established the business requirements for the reviews it wanted posted, Bazaarvoice designated a team of moderators to manage the brand’s customer review

program. “These were people who were trained on our brand and who understand our products, our competitors and what our business requirements are,” Glass says.

When a review is rejected, the moderators send it to Bath & Body Works’ customer service department. Customer service representatives then contact those customers to let them know why their reviews were rejected. “That gives the customer another opportunity to go back and revise their review to get it published,” says Glass. Bath & Body Works does not reject reviews because they are negative: “We look for the honesty and believe in it to keep the reviews authentic and relevant.”

Each review page gives customers the option of ranking a product from one to five stars on criteria like fragrance, performance and price value; there also is a field in which customers can submit comments.

If, as a customer, I “see that the reviewer and I seem to be aligned in our tastes, I will likely put more credibility into their reviews and probably be more likely to buy the products they recommend,” Glass says.

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