Award-winning research reveals why the best online reviews show and tell
Photos are everywhere and increasingly so in online reviews. But do they actually make reviews more useful to readers?
New, award-winning research from Assistant Professor of Marketing and Logistics Gizem Ceylan suggests that the answer depends on what the photo shows.
Ceylan was honored with the prestigious 2026 Don Lehmann Award, which recognizes the best dissertation-based article published in either the Journal of Marketing or the Journal of Marketing Research.
She received the award for her 2024 paper, “Words Meet Photos: When and Why Photos Increase Review Helpfulness,” which explores how photos influence the value consumers derive from online reviews.
Drawing on a massive dataset of 7.4 million Yelp reviews and 3.5 million accompanying photos, Ceylan and her co-authors, Kristin Diehl and Davide Proserpio, found that reviews with photos are generally considered more helpful than reviews without them. More significantly, reviews become even more useful when the photos reinforce the same information described in the written review.
For example, if a restaurant reviewer praises a dish's presentation and includes a photo of that meal, consumers are more likely to find the review helpful than if the photo highlights something unrelated.
"Our findings show that photos don't just add visual appeal," said Ceylan. "They work best when they complement and reinforce the message consumers are already receiving through text."
The researchers discovered that this alignment between words and images makes reviews easier for consumers to process and understand. When information is easier to process, people perceive it as more helpful.
The study also found that the benefits of combining photos and text can diminish when barriers make content harder to understand, such as poor-quality images or overly complex language.
The findings offer practical guidance for businesses, marketers and online platforms seeking to improve customer engagement and decision-making. Encouraging customers to include photos that directly support the points made in their reviews can increase the usefulness of user-generated content.
Platforms like Yelp or Amazon could go further by calculating a similarity score between a review’s photos and text, using it to rank reviews so the most helpful rise to the top. They could also prompt users during the review-writing process, surfacing relevant photos as the text is drafted to encourage better alignment between what reviewers write and what they show. Likewise, maintaining clear review formats and high-quality images can help consumers make more informed choices.
Established by the Marketing Research Special Interest Group of the American Marketing Association, the Don Lehmann Award is one of the marketing discipline's most respected honors for emerging scholars, recognizing research that demonstrates exceptional rigor, innovation and impact.
For Ceylan, the award underscores the growing importance of understanding how consumers navigate an increasingly visual digital marketplace.
"This is one of the first papers to examine the interplay between photos and text in online reviews," she said. "Until now, most researchers focused on text or photos in isolation; we show that when they work together, their combined effect on review helpfulness is far greater than either alone. We are deeply grateful for this recognition."
