Colin Auton explores what remains the go-to metric for many brands, and asks whether this single number really reflects how and why people talk about brands.
“Would you recommend NPS?”
Now there’s a question. Whenever we’re running a customer satisfaction or brand tracking programme, we’re often asked to include an NPS measure. And we get it. Clients like a single measure that’s easy to understand and interpret. There’s the odd occasion where it doesn’t seem right, such as when you’re asking a broker how likely they’d be to recommend an insurer or energy company. And yet because the client is keen to know their NPS, the question stays in.
Is it still “the one number” you need to grow?
When you dig into the latest thinking on word of mouth (WOM) recommendation, it does make you question the relevance of NPS. If you think about normal WOM behaviour, you might proactively recommend a brand to share how much you love it or because you’ve had such a positive experience, or alternatively to seek revenge after a particularly negative experience. However, you might also be triggered to recommend a brand just to be helpful, to impress someone, because someone asked about it, or because the brand just happened to come up in conversation.
We’ve come across respondents who give a 5-6 rating when asked the NPS question, and when we probe to understand why, they say it’s because they’d just never recommend a brand in that category (for example, their bank, insurance company, or energy provider). And there’s also evidence to show that it’s the passives (those giving 7-8 NPS ratings) who give the most positive WOM (Romaniuk et al. 2010), and they’re excluded from the NPS metric. We’ve seen this in our own research, which we discussed HERE.
It’s also important to note that the NPS question is only asked to customers. It excludes non-buyers and lapsed customers and therefore underestimates negative WOM. Additionally, it only considers the giver-side of the equation. It doesn’t take any account of the receiver. Did the recommendation actually land and grab their attention? And did they act on it? Were they even able to?
If it’s not NPS, then what?
So, if you’re serious about measuring WOM, all the latest theory points to you needing to look beyond NPS:
- Take into consideration all the different behavioural contexts and nuances when interpreting WOM and likelihood to recommend.
- Measure actual instances of positive and negative WOM.
- Take into consideration the recipients as well as the givers
Ultimately, if you want to understand the true impact of word of mouth, relying on a single score simply isn’t enough. NPS can offer a snapshot, but it overlooks the complexity of real recommendation behaviour. the context, the motivations, and the crucial role of the receiver all matter. By broadening your measurement to capture actual positive and negative WOM, and by recognising how recommendations actually happen, you’ll gain a far more accurate view of how your brand is really performing.
If you’d like support in building a more meaningful approach to WOM measurement, Colin or Claire at Mustard would be happy to help.