Incentivizing Customer Reviews in the Grocery Industry: The Re-Taled Project's Approach

Nowadays, user-generated content is pivotal for companies: people trust other customers' opinions more than any brand advertisement. Brands are aware of this and try to promote and motivate their customers to create high-quality content. The promotion is still at an early stage, though: there is a lack of fairness, as companies do not provide a validation system, or if they do, it is not based on a transparent solution, and there is no reward for creating unique and high-quality content. In this paper, we focus on the problem of incentivizing the user's creation of content, in the form of customer reviews, in the online grocery industry. Specifically, we illustrate the experience gained in the first months of the Re-Taled project in applying blockchain technology to provide a solution to the problem faced. The aim is to develop a decentralized ecosystem of consumers, influencers, and manufacturers, where content creators are rewarded for their contribution according to an algorithm that provides incentives in the form of both reputation and monetization. Blockchain technology is used to certify the content's authenticity and compensate content creators with an open-source cryptographic token named TALE. We illustrate the technical choices of the solution together with its software architecture design. Moreover, we introduce the algorithm used to validate the trustworthiness of user-generated content and promote fairness and transparency within the platform.