Brand Research > CX Research

To be clear, the headline says "Brand Research is greater than Customer Experience (CX) Research."

Those in marketing communications, brand management and researchers with a bit 'o gray in their hair won't find this revelatory. People in companies who believe that their NPS score or CX metrics are the most important KPI to predict business results are going to find this troublesome reading.

Let's start with what's behind this assertion. Brand architecture -- the "framework" upon which your brand health is based -- includes:

• The marketplace in which you operate, including competitors;
• Awareness and usage of your brand;
• The reputation of your brand;
• Attitudes and perceptions of your brand among both customers and non-customers;
• The customer experience you provide overall, as well as within channels; and
• Other exogenous factors that I won't include here for simplicity.

Notice that customer experience is a component of brand. If you're staking your company's future only upon a CX metric, plus sales, you're leaving out all of the other components of brand health.

Have you conducted a key driver analysis for your brand? A key driver analysis (KDA) is a technique that helps decision-makers understand the importance of -- or contribution to -- an outcome, such as revenue. If you run a KDA just on your customer experience metrics, with revenue or other business results as the outcome, you've likely seen this for yourself: the amount of total variance explained overall is a lot smaller than you likely want.

If you have run this KDA on your brand components with the same outcome (business results, etc.), you've likely seen that it explains a greater amount of the variance in the outcome variable.

The reasons why this is the case are manifold, but the explanation is easy. Think about your car. If you only measure the condition of your drive train as a way to explain the "health" of your automobile, you're leaving out other critical systems, like electrical, steering and suspension, tires, the condition of the body, safety systems, etc.

The same is true if you only measure CX as a way to understand your brand's performance. CX might be your "drive train" but it doesn't tell you about the condition of the whole. Statisticians and marketing scientists might call this a "misspecified" model.

Further, when you're measuring CX, you're typically only doing so among your customers, or those who have "experienced" your brand in some fashion. Among the two main types of CX research -- relational and transactional -- customers are the primary focus.

Some companies wisely measure "exited" customers (those who've quit your brand) or prospective customers who've tried but rejected your brand. Many conduct competitive CX studies, which compares your CX metrics to customers of competitor brands.

None of these types of studies include the overall components of brand and positioning work.

Most importantly, companies rely heavily upon attracting new customers: new to your category or swiped from your competitors. These prospects are typically excluded from CX research.

Ask yourself, if only 90% of your current customers are still with you after a year, what do you know about the 10% who will have to fill your funnel to stay even? Do you believe that an NPS score (which is a Likelihood to Recommend question) asked among your own customers -- or prospects who have never experienced your brand -- will inform you about that?

The answer to this is probably "no."

Most companies do conduct both brand and CX research. Which one do you think gets more airplay with senior leadership and your board? Have you ever heard a CEO or President of a major company talk about the results their brand study on analyst calls? How about NPS?

Brand often gets a bad rap as a "soft measurement" vs. CX metrics, which are often part of senior compensation in some companies and part of the compensation equation in many "brand-based" or "channel-based" companies.

Business schools teach that what gets measured gets managed well. The truth is, in many companies, this has become "what gets compensated gets managed well."

Consider what you're leaving on the table by focusing on CX to the exclusion of other brand components. CX is an important piece of the brand puzzle, but not important enough to ignore the big picture.

#Brand #BrandResearch #Brand>CX #CX #CustomerExperience #CustomerExperienceResearch #CXResearch

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Eric Levy is a professional researcher, insights leader and customer experience practitioner. In one of his many roles in the industry, he was the Senior Strategic Consulting Director for Customer Experience and Loyalty Methods and Models and the Vice President of Global Marketing at Maritz Research (now InMoment) working as a customer experience practitioner across a wide range of industries and sectors. He also has also led the Brand and Advertising Research function at Bank of America and served as a Brand Planner at Arnold Worldwide.