We often rely on reviews to determine whether something is worth your money.

But sometimes, reviews can seem a bit fishy, like in the case of Kemono Healthy Japanese Roast Chicken.

Micro-influencers provide 5-star reviews on Facebook

We'll just lay it out here for you. These are Facebook reviews of Kemono Healthy Japanese Roast Chicken by micro-influencers who are managed by Faves Asia.

Yes, that Faves Asia:

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5-star reviews on Google listing as well

It seems that our micro-influencers can hardly contain their joy about said roast chicken. Here are their reviews (5 stars!) on Google and Instagram, and we've linked to their Faves Asia profiles for your reference too.

Also note the number of reviews posted by each of them on Google. This will come in handy later:

Evelyn Lam:

Nicole Lee:

Serene Koh:

Sharon Nadine:

Jennifer Ghiam (her Instagram profile identifies her as a Faves personality):

A different story from "non-influential" reviewers

Of course it could be that normal mortals like us don't possess the same taste as micro-influencers. So here are a couple of Google reviews of Kemono left by reviewers who have left... a few more reviews on other places before:

(As an aside, the Google Local Guide is a community-driven programme that helps Google Maps users by reviewing the places one visits.)

It should be noted that Kemono Japanese Roasted Chicken on Google only had two reviews by frequent reviewers. The rest were submitted by users with one or two reviews.

Paid promotions, if any, require disclosure

While you may expect your favourite influencer to promote products and services on their own platforms, the waters get murky when it comes to leaving reviews on public platforms like Facebook pages and Google listings.

Having clear and proper disclosure of paid partnerships is required under guidelines by the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore (ASAS).

For example, Kemono's sponsored partnership with MissTamChiak was disclosed in their blog post.

We're not clear if the reviews left by the Faves Asia influencers influencers were paid for by Kemono, or if all of them really just happened to be so enthusiastic about their chicken that they took to all of their social media platforms to praise it. And for several, for their first time on Google reviews.

This curious incident was highlighted to Mothership by an anonymous reader who was "sold instantly" by the reviews on Facebook and Google but found that the chicken did not live up to the hype.

We have sent our queries to Faves Asia to ask if this was a paid micro-influencer project for Kemono.

Here's another Faves Asia story:

Top images via Kemono Japanese Roast Chicken and Facebook.