Reputation Has Two Dimensions
A five-star rating does not mean that a business has a good reputation. It is possible for a business to be highly rated yet almost unknown, or to be very well known but poorly regarded. These are separate strategic issues. Most dashboards are not capable of distinguishing between the two.
There are two dental practices one mile apart; both have an average rating of 4.9 stars on Google: the first with 43 reviews and the second with 800.
The first practice is in a different strategic position from the second. The fact that 43 reviews have an average rating of 4.9 shows that the patient base is small and highly satisfied. This conclusion is clear, but its scope is limited. When most people look for a dentist in that area, they will see the rating, note the low number of reviews, and judge how established the practice is.
The fact that there are 800 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 shows that the practice is well-established and widely recognized in the market, and provides a clear indication of high quality that has spread far and wide. The judgment in this regard is just as strong. The extent of the reach, however, differs by a factor of ten.
These practices both have a rating of 4.9 stars. Yet they do not enjoy equivalent reputations, and the current vocabulary for discussing reputation, which takes the average rating as its primary indicator, cannot make this difference clear.
What the Research Proposes
In a paper appearing in Electronic Commerce Research in September 2026, the Business Reputation Score is introduced. This composite index combines two dimensions that are currently treated separately: perceived quality, measured by the average star rating, and market recognition, measured by the number of reviews.
The researchers claim that digital reputation is, by its nature, multidimensional and that assessing it using separate indicators fails to capture the construct's true structure. A business which has both high perceived quality and high market recognition holds a different strategic position from one that is strong in one aspect and weak in another. If both of these aspects are reduced to a single figure, or if only one is used, the resulting measure will be unable to distinguish between situations that call for entirely different strategic responses.
The study looked at how the characteristics of a business, its spatial location and its category together affect its reputation by using the Yelp Open Dataset and an explainable machine learning approach. The results of the study are significant: the neighborhood in which a business is situated—particularly the reputation of other businesses in the area—affects that business's reputation. It is therefore not just a matter of what takes place within the business; its surroundings also play a role.
A high rating and a good reputation are not the same thing; one indicates the strength of a judgement while the other shows how far that judgement has spread. A marketing strategy that focuses on one while neglecting the other addresses the wrong issue.
The Two-Dimension Framework
If you divide reputation into the quality of the signal and the extent to which that signal reaches people, you get four clear strategic positions, each with different implications for the actions the business needs to take.
High quality, high reach — Strong rating, high review volume
The most highly regarded position. The evaluations are good and widely spread among the public. This is the goal that most businesses strive for, even though few have intentionally planned a route to achieve it. The main strategic difficulty is maintaining the quality signal as volume increases.
High quality, low reach— Strong rating, low review volume
The position that most frequently underperforms in genuinely good businesses is this one; although the judgment itself is excellent, very few people outside the present customers have come across it. The strategic issue in this case is not one of quality but of distribution. What the business needs is for more people to reach the judgment and express it, not for the judgment itself to be improved.
Low quality, high reach— Weaker rating, high review volume
The reputation is visible but has been damaged. It is not a question of the signal's reach. The issue lies with the signal itself. Although the volume of reviews is high, the average is weak; this shows that the reach is functioning, but the experience is not meeting the standard required by the brand position. Adding more distribution to a weak quality signal only makes the problem more obvious, not less obvious.
Low quality, low reach— Weaker rating, low review volume
The most inconspicuous one and possibly the most misleading. Since its reach is limited, the business is not subject to much scrutiny, so a quality issue may not become apparent until a larger number of reviews have been collected. This position is often held by new businesses and those that are recovering.
Most discussions about reputation concentrate on the first and third quadrants, that is, on the strong position and the crisis position; the most common and least examined position is the second one, which refers to a truly good business that has not yet spread the signal of its quality to the group of people who could benefit from it.
Reputation Reach as a Separate Strategic Problem
In most organizations, the aspects of reputation quality and reputation reach react differently to various interventions and are managed by separate functions within the organization. Reputation quality results from operations, service delivery, staff training and product decisions. Reputation reach, on the other hand, is the result of marketing decisions—namely, how actively the organization asks for reviews on these platforms, from which customers and at what stages in the relationship.
The reason most businesses ask customers to leave reviews is to get more reviews. This is different from having a purposeful strategy to spread a particular quality signal to an audience that hasn't yet encountered it. A healthcare organization that provides excellent care but has only a small number of reviews on the sites where new patients look for providers has a reach problem, not a quality problem. The solution to this situation is not to improve the care itself, but to develop the distribution channel for the judgments that patients are already making.
The same lesson applies in reverse: when a company addresses a low average rating by asking for more reviews, it treats a quality problem as if it were a reach problem. Regardless of what the quality signal actually is, distributing more reviews to a wider audience strengthens that existing signal. If the signal is weak, increasing the reach makes the weakness more obvious—the order in which the actions are taken is important. Quality comes before reach; extending the reach of a quality signal that has not yet been achieved speeds up the incorrect result.
The order in which the interventions are carried out is important; if a reach strategy is used before the quality signal is strong enough to allow amplification, it will not enhance reputation, merely spreading out the current reputation no matter what it is.
The Spatial Finding Worth Knowing
The study found a factor not considered by most reputation strategy frameworks: namely, that digital reputation is spatially embedded, as the quality of the area's business reputation affects the business in question.
It is an example of a spillover effect. When a business is located among competitors with high ratings, it gains an advantage from the surrounding context, since the area sets a standard of quality and the business is then assessed in part against this background. On the other hand, a business with good quality indicators that is situated in a region where neighboring businesses have poor review records faces the opposite situation: the local context establishes a lower standard that the individual business has to exceed rather than benefit from.
The practical significance is small but worth mentioning: reputation is not merely the outcome of what happens within the business; it also depends, in part, on the competitive and geographical environment in which the business operates. This does not alter the basic strategic task of producing quality and expanding reach. Still, it does indicate that the competitive context is part of the reputation equation and should not be treated as a separate issue.
The Organizational Question
Most businesses have a person in charge of their average rating. They handle complaints and reply to negative reviews. The operations team also focuses on the quality of delivery. These are all quality-related activities, and they are important.
There are a small number of businesses that have a specific person in charge of reputation reach—someone who systematically extends the quality signal to people who have not yet formed an opinion. Although this relates to marketing, it is seldom seen as a reputation responsibility and is more typically described as a reviews strategy or an online presence strategy. Because of this, it remains at a tactical level rather than being linked to the strategic issue of how far the organization's reputation has actually extended relative to the market it aims to serve.
The difference between an organization's real reputation and its market reach is one of the most frequently unmeasured strategic gaps in business; it is not reflected in the average rating and does not appear in the customer satisfaction survey but rather emerges when you compare the number of people in the target market who have already formed an opinion of the organization with the number who could have done so based on the quality of what the organization is actually delivering.
An average rating of five stars does not constitute a good reputation; it is a good quality signal that has yet to be widely distributed. It is important to distinguish between the two when an organization assesses its position and decides what actions to take.
Reputation quality and reputation reach are two separate issues, falling within the remit of different functions and reacting to different kinds of intervention. Most reputation strategies regard them as a single issue. Only those organizations that understand the difference are addressing the correct problem rather than the more obvious one.
Some ideas are worth discussing in the context of your organization.
