What Separates the Best Customers from the Merely Satisfied?

Brands put billions into boosting awareness, satisfaction, and loyalty, but they often overlook the most powerful driver of customer value: emotional connection.  Our research involving hundreds of brands across dozens of categories shows that consumers who are emotionally connected with a brand are anywhere from 25% to 100% more valuable in terms of revenue and profitability than those who are “merely” highly satisfied with it (for details, see our HBR article “The New Science of Customer Emotions).

Customers connect emotionally with brands when the brand resonates with their deepest emotional drives – things like a desire to feel secure, to stand out from the crowd, or to be the person they want to be. To assess how well a brand is doing at this, we developed the “emotional connection score” (ECS), which measures the share of a brand’s customers who are fully emotionally connected to it. Clearly, brands with low scores are leaving money on the table, mistakenly believing that their work is done if their customers are, simply, happy with the brand.

We measured emotional-connection scores for 39 well-known brands and compared these with the percent of consumers who considered each of them a “good brand” (a typical market research measure of a brand’s reputation, and one of the key components of high customer satisfaction). The chart below shows how brands scored on these two measures. The key takeaway: highly satisfied customers often have low emotional connection – and that represents both a problem and an opportunity.

 

The chart offers four other important take-aways.

1.                  Great advertising and customer focus don’t necessarily translate into emotional connection. Many brands that have invested a lot in emotion-evoking advertising or creating powerful customer experiences have high “good brand” scores, but fairly modest emotional connection scores (consider Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks). Furthermore, these brands’ smaller rivals have similar or higher ECSs (Pepsi, Adidas, Dunkin’ Donuts).

2.                  Just because a brand is ubiquitous doesn’t mean it’s making strong emotional connections. If anything, the reverse may be true: Facebook’s ECS is down at the bottom of the list, along with McDonald’s and WalMart’s.

3.                  You don’t have to be an upscale brand to connect emotionally. While some of the brands at the top of the list are ones we might expect – it’s not surprising that a luxury/lifestyle brands such as Tiffany and BMW have high ECSs – Marriott’s ECS is not far behind.

4.                  Variations within industries can be dramatic. While some competitors’ ECSs are clustered (Progressive, GEICO, and United Healthcare’s scores fall within a 2-point range), ECS is not bounded by category or industry. A number of companies have found ways to break out of the pack when it comes to emotional connection. Virgin America’s ECS is up at the top of the list while United trails. While Schwab and American Express are both financial services companies known for their customer focus and powerful branding, and their “good brand” scores are similar, Schwab’s ECS is considerably higher than AMEX’s. Schwab is doing a much better job translating its strong brand image into real emotional connection.

Because the science of customer emotions is new, it shouldn’t be surprising that many companies’ size, marketing investments, or brand positioning do not appear to be driving much emotional connection. What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.  But as our research shows, high customer satisfaction can mask low customer engagement. Strategies that boost emotional connection deliver new opportunities for growth and competitive advantage.