No brand is an island
Newton’s third law of branding: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Pretty sure Newton was a branding guy, because nowadays every single brand’s action or lack of action is instantly ignored or recognized by customers. Social media has definitely catapulted this relationships to warp speed and has brought a new kind of approach to every effort a brand plans to implement. Just like John Donne’s famous words say, no brand lives in a vacuum anymore and now more than ever in the history of marketing, brand marketing teams are dependent on the consumers’ reactions and need to monitor consumers like never before.
Long gone are the days where it was good enough to measure customer satisfaction through simple surveys. Now it is of absolute importance to keep a hand on the pulse of customers, be agile and improve on their existing and potential needs. Some brands have developed metrics through social platforms, mobile apps and camouflaged in-store interactions. C_Space, a New England based global customer agency took it up a notch and created an index to measure this relationship. Two years ago they started a study that measures this brand and customer relation and trademarked the term Customer Quotient.
According to the 2016 C-Space’s study “Customer Quotient is the capacity of a company or brand to build strong relationships with its customers. The CQ framework measures the five key attributes of brand behavior that customers really value — from the customer’s perspective, not the company’s — that correlate with growth and profitability including revenue, return on assets and likelihood to recommend.”
These five attributes are listed as openness, relevance, empathy, experience, and emotion. A local brand may not have the pockets to commission a CQ survey for their own brand but the beauty of this study is that it is available for free and may serve as an excellent blueprint for marketing teams. It serves as a healthy exercise for CMOs and their marketing team to take existing data and stop seeing it from their side, reprogramming and seeing everything through the eye of the consumer.
Openness goes beyond the intent and into a genuine interest in engaging in conversations with your customer, from decisions that will most probably affect service to feedback new products. Relevance pertains to brands that need to be in touch with the now and act within context. Empathy is very much similar to human empathy in that it requires fro brands to travel in their customer shoes and see things through their eyes. Brand experience is seen as an integral part of a brand’s spine and runs from through all brand assets from CEO to intern. Emotion may be the most challenging for a brand because it calls for a corporation to completely humanize their essence and develop emotional connections that basically make people feel something for a brand.
According to the study, the industries customers feel most respected are household, beauty, personal care, ngo’s, grocery and fitness. Industries where customers feel the least respected are automotive, health/car insurance, government and telco. Locally it would be very interesting to develop this CQ report for our tourism industry. Measuring this quotient on a yearly basis will help us develop such and important factor of our economy and would establish and excellent framework to develop products for latent needs of the ever evolving global visitor economy.
Are we overcomplicating this relationship? The issue is beyond complicating. It is a conversation that needs to happen within the industry and brands in order to create a profitable marriage between data and creativity. This kind of study just makes marketing moves and advertising efforts much less about guessing and more about accountability. Just like in digital ads we may place pixels to follow ad performance, brand efforts may be shadowed and measured so that CQ may improve on a year to year basis.
Real time decisions, which are common in this new era of instant gratification and the fact that social media makes social issues a constant cause of brand’s immediate reaction would benefit greatly from a CQ index. By actually knowing customers, their triggers, their feelings and emotional values, CQ wouldl equip brands with better customer intuition. So in cases, such as the Puerto Rican Day Parade boycott, brands may take decisions based less on internal feelings and will actually be able to predict the potential customer reaction to their actions or lack thereof.
Bosses will claim, oh they will channel Biden and say that this CQ voodoo emotional index is a bunch of malarkey. But the study does show that investing in vested consumers will show up positively in your register. “On a lifetime value basis, emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. These emotionally connected customers buy more of your products and services, visit you more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to your communications, follow your advice, and recommend you more — everything you hope their experience with you will cause them to do.”
No brand is an island. The question is if brands will see CQ as an investment in engaging further with vested customers or will they choose to be isolated from an emotional connection that translates into a profitable relationship.
Originally published May 2017.