Customer Satisfaction Measurement - The Leadership Factor

Brand tags

Every so often the blogosphere comes up with a good idea. Once in a blue moon it's a really good idea.

Brand image has always been a tricky beast to pin down, but most people would define it as something like the sum of all the attitudes and associations that consumers hold about a particular brand. Some different ways of putting this:

It has always seemed to me that your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com

Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon. Jeremy Bullmore

A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures. Michael Eisner

We have the power to shape brands to be what we want… Wally Olins

A brand image is shaped by the products and services themselves, by the consumption environment, by marketing communications and, perhaps most importantly, by the behaviour of the organisation and its employees.

So how do you measure something so vast and intangible? One technique is to ask people what associations they have for a particular brand, something along the lines of "what 3 words come to mind", and over a sample of hundreds some interesting patterns will emerge.

Brand tags is a website that does exactly the same thing, across a whole host of brands, and represents the results in the form of a "tag cloud" similar to the one to the right of this blog. A fascinating concept, and there are some revealing results. You can take part in the tagging or simply browse through the  brands.

Here's a snippet of the cloud for a famous sports shoe brand:

Can you guess who it is? If not peek at the image title/alt tag, or listen to more hip hop!

Scatterplots—they're really not that hard!

The intermittently good blog Junk Charts has another post highlighting the danger of thinking that you can analyse the relationship between two variables simply by plotting them next to each other on a line chart.

The problem is that line charts really don't give you the ability to tell if there is a relationship or not, but your brain may well con you into believing that they do because of our tendency to see patterns (even if they're not there). Take this chart:

Is there a relationship between the two lines? When you've made up your mind click here to see a scatter plot of the same data. It's a lot easier to tell isn't it?

Why are people so afraid of scatterplots? They're one of the most useful basic tools in any analyst's toolkit, and they're really a very simple idea—essentially a scatterplot is just a map. If you don't feel comfortable with them perhaps it's time you learnt to be!

How do customer emotions impact your business?

Customer emotions are often overlooked when organisations think about the customer satisfaction levels they are getting, or how to improve customer loyalty. But, the evidence is that customer emotions play a key role in this area.

When the concept of customer emotion is addressed by a business, more often than not it seems that it is of the 'wow - delight the customer' variety, but is this really the emotional engagement that customers are looking for?

Well, you can find the answers to the above points and read an article that goes into much more depth in the most recent Stakeholder magazine (see my previous post for the link).

There's also a half-day briefing that's being led by two of my colleagues in London later this month. You can see full details of the customer emotions briefing and book your place by following this link.

Stakeholder Satisfaction Magazine

If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you get hold of Stakeholder Satisfaction magazine, the most recent issue came out a couple of weeks ago. It deals with all aspects of customer & employee satisfaction. It has some great case studies as well.

If you are in the UK and qualify, you can sign up for a free print copy here.

Alternatively, read the articles online (including back issues) here.

Let us know what you think.