Determine and Quantify the drivers of Customer Loyalty

Millions of dollars and countless hours are spent each year by organizations trying to determine exactly what company, product and service features drive customer loyalty.

To date the normal approach is for companies to engage a market research company who then ask a range of customers “what they think” of company x or product y.

The data is then passed through sometimes complex calculations to arrive at a statistically valid importance for a range of variables. Often however the results are less than spectacular.

The problem lies with the first step – asking the customers what they think!

Psychologists have known for a while that if you want to know what someone thinks the last thing you should do is ask them directly. Brand Keys uses a unique questioning approach that provides an accurate understanding of what your customers really think.

It starts with a proprietary questionnaire that is based on established, empirically proven psychological-testing instrument. So instead of asking questions like "Are you happy with this product?", it employs "personification" techniques. A respondent might, for example, be asked

"If Absolut vodka were a person, would it tend to
plan things in advance
or do things on the spur of the moment?"

Or

"If Mercedes-Benz were a person, would it like to
chat in a group or one-on-one?"

Any one of these questions, by itself, is more or less meaningless (if not downright absurd). But put together a set of the right questions and, if you know how to read the results, you have an extremely detailed look at an individual's relationship to the person, place or thing being personified.

Most important, because our questionnaire is a subtle psychological probe, not a blunt instrument, you will know what respondents really feel, not just what they say they feel.

The proof of this approach is in the results. From cars to cable television and airlines to mutual funds this technique has shown a remarkable ability to identify the underlying drivers of customer loyalty.