When it comes to taste - no opinion matters more than yours. But is personalizing restaurant recommendations an entirely new concept? No. Not by a long shot.
But those who have previously demonstrated success have built their recommendation platforms with a heavy reliance on other people's opinions (i.e., social media activity) which may have been groundbreaking 5-10 years ago but since that time, even the least tech-savy among us have come to understand how the algorithms generally work far more than they did back then: "More likes and better reviews equals more exposure".
Social Media activity and public reviews are now easily monetized, manipulated and corrupted in an effort to "help the algorithm" or produce desired results for individuals and businesses via benevolence, abuse, fraud and now bots.
Audience Effect tells us that online public behavior is not a perfect reflection of genuine interest or feeling. The mere fact that public online ratings are for the benefit and attention of others, demonstrably influences those ratings and reviews. That's one of the reasons we’ve found our anonymous first-party and zero-party granular data to be the most reliable, informative and immediately actionable data out there.
3 out of 4 Americans now identify as "foodies" and many are willing to adopt a more humane approach to restaurant recommendations in exchange for the critic-culture mindset that has long plagued the industry .
Traditional public rating platforms still editorialize millions of reviews and encourage diners to issue one-size-fits-all scores to restaurants; but modern technology now affords us the ability to analyze personal taste and help people find more restaurants they'll love without having to build another public review soapbox that serves more as a place for people to air grievances than it does to build much needed bridges between guests and the restaurants they'll love.