The power of a recommendation

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The reputation of a brand is one of the most important metrics any company can measure, it indicates current performance but helps project future value.

joss

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a hugely useful and simple metric for measuring this. It is a very simple, but powerful, metric to gauge consumers/respondents sentiment with the brand or service on offer.  Particularly when one considers how easy it is to start measuring and how it can be tracked over time and against other companies/competitors.

It is based on asking respondents a single question that is predictive of both repurchase and referral:

“On a scale of zero to 10, how likely are you to refer a friend of colleague?”

The answers that are given place respondents in one of three categories:  Detractors (0-6), Passives (7-8) and Promoters (9-10). The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of “Detractors” from the percentage of “Promoters”.

As a live brand experience agency it can be a hugely significant indicator for us of the impact of an activation. Asking people “how likely are you to refer this activity to a friend or colleague?” seems to me to be quite a pure and honest way to understand how they actually felt about their experience. 

This provides a very immediate measure of the impact of the engagement and the important potential word of mouth amplification. Additionally it also gives a quantifiable ‘score’ to share with the business internally and help guide future activations.

What is surprising is that so few businesses (and their agencies) in the UK seem to be using NPS. It seems like more US companies have more readily adopted this methodology than UK businesses and frequently track weekly scores for their brands/services. Companies such as Apple, Hilton, Marriot, American Express, E.ON, Philips, GE use NPS as a core metric. 

Of course, NPS is just one metric that can be used but I think it is quite an important one.  According to a recent Momentum Worldwide report attending a branded live experience drives 65% of people to recommend the brand and 59% to buy it at retail afterwards.

So it may be worth checking with the people that matter whether your brand, activation or experience is on the right track in order to push forward in the right direction.


Author bio

GLOBAL BUSINESS DIRECTOR

With nearly 30 years of marketing experience, both client and agency side, I’ve acquired a rare perspective on brands and business: I believe you have to challenge things creatively if you want to grow sales. Consumer technology is reshaping our world, and it’s only the great brands that stay on the crest.