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Today, I read a staggering report about the wine platform Vivino on the VRT NWS website: popular wines may owe their high scores not to the quality of the grape, but to an army of fake reviews. It is a case that made me reflect on the broader implications for our digital society.
We thought that with platforms like Vivino, we had achieved the democratization of taste. No more pretentious sommeliers, but the honest opinion of the people. However, the investigation by the VRT editorial team exposes the fundamental friction between algorithmic scalability and human integrity. Fake reviews pollute the system. It is the ultimate warning for the organization of tomorrow: those who sail blindly on data will end up with a hangover.
The principle of the ‘digital people’s jury’ is wonderful, until the jury turns out to consist of paid review farms and algorithms echoing one another. The news that popular wines on Vivino may owe their stars to manipulation is more than just a consumer scandal. It exposes a fundamental problem in our current digital economy: the erosion of authenticity.
The Inflation of the Star
We have become addicted to scores. Whether it concerns a bottle of rosé, a hotel room, or an employee’s performance; we want to reduce the complexity of reality to a number between 1 and 5.
But data is patient. And manipulatable. As soon as a score becomes the most important measure of success (the ‘Goodhart’s Law’ principle: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure), the system becomes corrupt. Producers buy stars, not because their wine has improved, but because the algorithm would otherwise simply make them invisible.
The Human Factor as the Final Filter
What we are seeing here with Vivino is exactly what happens in HRM and Marketing when we cut the ‘human factor’ in favor of scalability.
An algorithm can analyze the chemical composition of a wine and aggregate the average opinion of 10,000 (whether real or not) accounts. But the algorithm tastes nothing. It lacks the context, the passion of the winemaker, and the years of expertise of the professional who knows that a score of 4.2 does not tell the whole story about the soul of the product.
In my previous pieces about the organization of tomorrow, I often emphasize the synergy between humans and technology. The Vivino case proves my point: technology is a fantastic assistant, but a terrible master. As soon as we replace human curation (the sommelier, the expert, the critical thinker) with a black box of data, we lose our grip on the truth.
The Call for Radical Authenticity
What does this mean for marketing and management? We are heading toward an era of ‘radical authenticity’.
- In marketing: Consumers are becoming immune to algorithmic recommendations. They are looking back to the source, the expert with a face and a story. The future does not belong to the party with the most reviews, but to the party with the most trust.
- In HRM: We must be careful not to judge employees the way we score a bottle of wine on Vivino. Those who manage by numbers will get people who manipulate the numbers. Those who manage through human contact will get genuine engagement.
Uncork the Critical Eye
The lesson of the Vivino fraud is, in my view, simple: trust the algorithm, but verify the human. The next time I stand before the wine shelf, I might still scan the bottle, but I will also take a moment to look at the shop assistant.
Because in a world full of fake stars, honest advice from person to person is the only true ‘five-star experience’ that remains.
