Who’s writing the reviews?

April 7, 2026/Business, Regulations/

Who’s writing the reviews? That’s one question that businesses, including funeral homes and cemeteries, don’t want potential consumers asking. I recently read an article in Funeral Service Times “that indicate(s) 89% of people refer to product or service reviews before making purchases.”

If true, that is an incredibly high proportion of shoppers and it goes to show the value of online reviews and why companies are so interested in getting your positive feedback. However, when a consumer can no longer trust that the reviews being generated are real and generated by previous customers of the business there will be a problem with believing the authenticity of the reviews. . . . .And that will put the “Review” system, as we know it today, in jeopardy.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what is appearing to happen in some industries, including the Death Care/Funeral/Cremation provider space in Great Britain. This recent article from Yahoo News (another version was also published in the pay-walled Funeral Service Times) reports that the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating Death Care provider Dignity about “concerns that it asked employees to write positive reviews about its crematoria services.”

Sarah Cardell the Chief Executive of the Competition and Markets Authority made this comment about the recent investigation, “Fake reviews strike at the heart of consumer trust – with many of us worrying about misleading content when looking at reviews online. . . . people need to know they’re getting genuine information – not reviews or star-ratings that have been manipulated to push them towards the wrong choice.”

The Funeral Service Times article went on to say:

“The national competition watchdog said it is looking into whether the company (Dignity) gave people “a potentially inaccurate picture of genuine customers’ feedback”. . . . . .The CMA said it had not yet made any decisions on whether the companies had broken UK consumer law.”

Dignity made the following response according to the Funeral Service Times article:

We take the CMA’s concerns extremely seriously and are fully cooperating with its investigation relating to the Crematorium and Memorial Group (CMG), a business division within our group. We are committed to ensuring full compliance with consumer law and will continue to engage constructively with the CMA throughout this process.”

Related Article — Amazon to ban fake reviewers and punish sellers that cheat system. Yahoo News from The Telegraph (Great Britain)

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily: My first thought to this article is that “firms that are writing fake reviews have too much time on their hands”. Of course, that is why they would write them — to garner more business.

I also found that it might be profitable for them to do so when I came upon a 2023 report of the British Department of Business and Trade that made this comment about fake reviews, “. . . the presence of well-written ‘subtle’ fake reviews leads to a statistically significant increase in the proportion of consumers buying the product with these fake reviews”.

Social media is an interesting topic and tool for business and the proper use of it can help businesses in many ways. However, as with other business tactics, there has to be rules so it cannot be manipulated to deceive consumers. Proven violators need to be punished or the idea of reviews or star ratings will become a relic of the past.

In the meantime, “Caveat emptor” . . . . the law doctrine for “Buyer beware”.

More news from the world of Death Care: