Issues and challenges with fake reviews in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing has been a key enabler for any business organization in today's digital world. It uses electronic means for promotion of products and services. Emergence and growth of ecommerce has been a big boost that has resulted in new techniques of digital marketing like product reviews. Customers like to buy online and product reviews play a key role in product selection by the customer. These product reviews are critical pieces of data that have significant impact on sales of products. Recent developments in Big Data Analytics based business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) use product reviews to understand customer sentiments. But fake product reviews may lead to a serious risk of losing customers. This paper is aimed to study the issues and challenges related to fake product reviews. The objective of the paper is to review the current research work in combating fake product reviews and to identify unaddressed areas and suitability of technology like blockchain to address the problem.