Mates’ rates

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Word-of-mouth recommendations are invaluable for brands. According to research by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, 13% of all sales are driven by word of mouth – a marketplace impact of around $6 million – while research from Forbes revealed that 81% of consumers are influenced in their purchase decisions by online posts from friends and family.

In fact, many people these days are reluctant to see, do, or purchase anything without first reading what other people have to say about it. And new app peeple, alongside others, is hoping to extend this to the ‘real’ world – by allowing you to assign ratings and reviews of one to five stars to everyone you know. 

According to the app’s website, peeple allows its users to provide recommendations on everyone they come into contact with – personally, professionally and romantically, as well as allowing users to be recommended themselves. “We want character to be a new form of currency,” the Canadian founders, Nicole McCullough and Julia Cordray, claim. 

“Once armed with these recommendations, you can turn them into your new form of currency to get better job opportunities, dates and networking opportunities,” the explanation on the app’s website reads. “The online social media space was lacking a safe place to manage your online reputation. We are confident that with peeple you will have it all.” Cordray, whose background is in marketing and recruitment, believes this is a good way for people to showcase their character. McCullough, a mother of two, wanted to create something that would help her to decide who she could trust with her children. 

The app is still in its beta testing phase but has come under significant criticism; it has been branded as the ‘Yelp for people’ and an article in The Washington Post criticised Cordray for not having “shed light on certain very critical issues, such as consent and bias, accuracy, and the fundamental wrongness of assigning a number value to a person”.

Other criticism levelled at the app included fears that it created the potential for people to be defamed quickly and easily – negative reviews were initially going to be live for at least 48 hours before they could be refuted, but this feature has since been revised so no time limit exists, and reviews cannot be made visible unless approved by the person being rated. 

Despite the backlash, peeple isn’t the only app in this genre. Dating app The Grade lets users’ matches – as well as people they know in real life – leave reviews on their dating profiles, and membership is revoked if they fail to meet the app’s standards. 

More sinister is ‘gossip app’ The Know, which allows people to connect anonymously for the sole purpose of talking about someone they both know.  The app’s users can type in up to 20 pieces of another person’s personal information, including full name, phone number, age, where they live, where they work, and make and model of their car. If another user has entered the same data, the two users are connected anonymously and can message each other. 

In the era of quantified self, perhaps quantifying others is the next logical step.