Last month, Shelley wrote an insightful piece on the possibilities and dangers of using Net Promoter Score, and the comments suggested that NPS may be on the way out.  Common arguments against NPS are that it is too difficult to know customers’ true needs through one question, and that companies should not place as much emphasis on one simple question.

For those of you who don’t deal with customer surveys on a daily basis, Net Promoter Score is a one-question survey (that is often supplemented with other questions) that assesses a company by asking customers: “How likely are you to recommend X Company to a friend or colleague?”  Respondents rate their likelihood or recommending X Company on a scale of 0-10, where 0-6 are “Detractors”, 7-8 are “Passives”, and 9-10 are “Promoters”; to determine a company’s NPS, companies subtract their percentage of “Detractors” from their percentage of “Promoters”.  The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Even though some are now questioning the value and validity of NPS, many are still using it.  Some companies have even been very successful in aligning themselves around NPS – it has given them an easy way to measure their customers’ happiness with the brand, and they have aligned their whole customer experience around making their customers more likely to recommend their brand.  Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey’s Ultimate Question 2.0 mentions two interesting ways companies have used NPS to boost their brands. Read More »

As consumers begin to tentatively emerge from the recession, we expect lots of brands to begin repositioning to capture additional wallet share in the coming months and years. There are countless examples of rebrands that haven’t gone well.  Brands find their current personality and values to be tired, outdated, or no longer accurate, so they go to extreme lengths to get back in the game (and back in the hands of consumers).  Sometimes, though, these efforts pay off.

In looking at successful rebrandings, we’ve found four keys to making a rebrand successful.  MLC members, visit our branding topic center to access more resources. Read More »

Focusing on extracting lifetime value from consumers allows companies to maximize their profits over the long-term.  Most marketers know this, yet they do not focus on building long-term customer value.

There are several reasons why these marketers do not focus on lifetime value.  The first is quarterly earnings pressure.  I’ll admit it: This is a big reason to try to maximize short-term value of customers.  Without hitting these quarterly earnings numbers, investors lost confidence and firms suffer.  Another major reason firms maximize short-term value is that it is easier to measure.  Direct marketing, for example, usually focuses on specific campaigns, and it is much easier to measure its impact than that of broader, brand-building efforts. Read More »

As detailed in our decision simplicity work from last summer, using trusted brand advisors can help build a brand.  These brand advocates help consumers relate to the brand, and they have much more credibility than other branded communications.  This trusted advice, along with helping consumers learn about your brand and weigh their options, simplifies decisions for consumers; these simpler decisions make them more likely to have brand intent, to follow through on that intent, to repurchase, and to recommend the products to their friends.

But many brands struggle with the risk involved when using consumers to market the brand.  After all, giving consumers the license to share their thoughts on your brand allows them to share the bad along with the good.  In addition, it can be hard to select the right people to represent the brand.

Ford tackled these challenges to launch the U.S. model of the Ford Fiesta by using consumer advisors, or “agents.”  To ensure that both consumers and the brand could trust the agents, Ford implemented a rigorous selection process to ensure good brand fit and social media reach.  Ford selected a very diverse group of agents, so most consumers in the Fiesta’s target demographic can find agents like them.

A larger struggle for most brands, though, is giving up control over what the consumer advisors say.  Ford knew it needed to balance the need for some brand control with the need to generate authenticity by giving agents uncensored speech, so they assigned monthly missions to give some structure to the agents’ experiences. Ford then allowed the agents to use their own blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, and videos.

In addition to providing structure for the agents, Ford further leveraged these missions by selecting some that highlighted the car’s features.  For example, one mission had one agent drive until his car ran out of gas, showcasing the car’s high gas mileage; other missions included turning the car into an ice-cream truck (showing off a large amount of trunk and storage space) and taking a road trip (to demonstrate its comfort over long distances).

Using the agents to tell the brand’s story had really positive results: Ford generated the same name awareness for the Fiesta as the Ford Edge and Flex had after two years of traditional advertising at just 10% the cost of a traditional media campaign.

After seeing such great success in the United States, Ford adopted the campaign for India.  MLC members, click here to read about how Ford used the agents to generate brand interest in an emerging market.

Black Friday may need a name-change – to Black Thursday.

Many big-box retailers this year are opening their stores on Thanksgiving Day itself to kick off the traditional after-turkey shopping rush.  Toys R Us is opening at 9 p.m., with Wal-Mart following soon after at 10 p.m.  Best Buy, Kohls, and Target are all opening at midnight.

The benefit of opening early seems clear: retailers hope that shoppers will head to their stores first and complete all of their holiday shopping in one fell swoop.  Also, opening on the night of Thanksgiving may attract shoppers who are bored after the turkey’s been eaten, the dishes have been washed, and the kids have been put to bed; an early opening may also attract those who love sleeping in (but are still awake at 9 or 10 at night).

And the demand may be there.  Brick-and-mortar retailers have increasingly more competition.  Amazon is offering daily deals leading up to Black Friday, and Amazon offers a lot more convenience than the hassle of dealing with Black Friday’s crowds, traffic, and sleep-deprivation.  In addition, consumers are retaining many of their recessionary behaviors, so they are more likely to hunt for the best deal.

This doesn’t mean that it is a good idea all around, though.  The early openings mean that employees have less time to spend with their families on Thanksgiving Day.  This early start to their Black Friday shifts means that many will have to duck out of Thanksgiving dinners early to sleep and prepare for work.

In a lot of ways, it’s a reflection on just how miserable the consumer economy in the US might be. Retailers know that they’re alienating their staffs by opening earlier and earlier each year, but it’s part of the marketing strategy to capture a greater percentage of consumer wallets. Retailers used to be able to do that by lowering prices, offering better products – that sort of thing – but as consumers fail to respond to those kinds of stimuli, stores are competing in other areas – like opening hours – instead.

Employees aren’t letting their bosses get off easy: A Target employee has launched an online petition to protest Target’s hours, and it has generated over 180,000 signatures as of Nov. 18.  A quick look through the comments suggests that consumers (as well as the employees) think Target has gone too far.  Many argue that Thanksgiving is a holiday that should be spent with family, and shopping should wait until about dawn on Black Friday.

Do you think consumers will relish shopping on Thanksgiving and adopt it as a new holiday tradition?  Or do you expect stores to be empty until the wee hours of Black Friday morning? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Even with deep customer understanding, companies still need to use creativity to look beyond what consumers say to create the best new products.  One often-told example of this is the iPod.  In the late ’90s, most consumers – anchored by their existing CD collections and players – thought they wanted a better Discman.  Thankfully for the hundreds of millions of iPod users worldwide, Apple had a better idea.  They realized that consumers, while they may have said that they just wanted a better Discman, would actually value a smaller device that can hold more music.  Because they coupled creativity with deep consumer knowledge, Apple was able to revolutionize the music industry through its creation of the iPod.

Just like Apple, automotive dealer software and services provider Reynolds and Reynolds has used more customer-focused insight generation to improve their new product development.  They realized that their marketing research practices had two major weaknesses: the current insights were anchored to existing products, and they were ambiguous and open to interpretation.  To get solve the problem of new ideas being limited by current offerings, Reynolds and Reynolds developed a better customer understanding of their true needs by identifying the results their customers are seeking to achieve (irrespective of existing products and services).  This reframing of insights from product- to job-based allowed Reynolds and Reynolds to figure out how it should best allocate its resources to meet their target’s needs; this new process increased the number of solutions-worthy insights seven-fold.  MLC members, learn more about how Reynolds and Reynolds shifted to this results-based insight generation and tackled the problem of ambiguous insights here. Read More »

As part of our initial work for our 2012 research on marketing analytics, we recently interviewed Wes Nichols, the co-founder and CEO of MarketShare, an organization that provides detailed analytical models and software that are predictive and show cross-channel attribution and lift effects.  Wes shared three challenges of adopting more thorough and developed analytics. Read More »

As my colleague Connie wrote last week, analytics can help companies like Capital One, Amazon, and Caesars grow by providing incredibly rich data on how to reach consumers.  These companies, along with a few others, have used their data to better segment consumers, allowing them to offer more targeted offers and product recommendations, which encourages the consumers to buy the products.

But not every company is maximizing their use of data.  One common problem is that individual employees aren’t using the data correctly.  As this quarter’s Executive Guidance says, only 38% of employees are Informed Skeptics, or employees who make good decisions based on data by combining the knowledge gleaned from the data with their own personal judgment.  Instead of balancing the qualitative and quantitative, almost half of employees (43%) trust empirics over their own judgment, while 19% ignore the data.  MLC members, to learn how your employees can become part of the 38% of Informed Skeptics, read the Executive Guidance here. Read More »

Walt Disney World is a vacation destination beloved by many (including me).  Its themed rides, immaculately dressed characters, and song-and-dance-filled shows are hard for most brands to emulate, but there are several non-princess-based strategies marketers can use to boost their own brands: Read More »

It can be said that employees know your products and customers best; they are the ones, after all, who design the products, work the manufacturing plants, and interact with customers. So it is natural that marketers would want to capitalize on all of the relevant knowledge employees have gathered, and many companies have invested in programs that help share all of this data. But even with today’s technologies like salesforce.com that help share institutional knowledge, it is challenging for Marketers to gather the best ideas from their teams (and it is even harder to source ideas from the company at large). Here are ways two companies have tackled this problem: Read More »