NPA vs Social, the perception of time in marketing

~ Friday July 24 2009 18:30
Last week I was called by my bank to invite me to come to my local office to talk with someone about my financial status. I agreed to go so I got invited for last monday. Of course I knew this had marketing written all over it, but I had the time and I was interested as well. So I went and had a good talk with someone. I got some extra insurance, I was happy and I guess he was happy. At the end he asked me for me email address to receive a questionnaire about our talk.

Today I finally received the questionnaire and filled it in. And of course it had marketing written all over it, but who cares. Except for the last question. Would you recommend us to your friends, family, relatives etc. based upon your meeting? Now that is a just a plain stupid question. The answer was no, because nobody in their right mind would recommend a bank to others, based on just one conversation. That question made the whole conversation feel forced and extremely aggressive and gave me a really negative feeling towards the brand. This is really bad, because if you look at the rest of this marketing thing, the brand scored really good actually.

I discussed this with my father and he told me that big corporations are in love with NPS (Net Promoter Scores). According to wikipedia: Net Promoter is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research. My father said that it works in the US and that’s the only reason why they’re trying it in Europe as well.

My problem with NPS is that it doesn’t work that way. With NPS you’re giving a short term score to something that is long term. Short term scoring with a long term mechanism is also, in my opinion, exactly why the economy is so bad at the moment. If you have a brand and you want me to keep loyal to you, you have to build some kind of relation with me. How deep this relation goes differs from person to person. The reason why brands want to score with people is of course your money. But people don’t want to feel forced in their opinion of a brand. A brand needs to earn their trust and reputation and that’s hard work.

Brand loyalty takes time and every step does count. It’s the average of the scores over a period of time. Time is an important factor: recent scores count more. If a company scores good over time but screws up in the end, people are usually still willing to trust the brand enough to stay loyal and give you a second chance (don’t screw that up). If a company scores bad over time but scores good in the end, people aren’t loyal but willing to give you a chance to prove yourself over time. That’s brand building.

If you look at social networking from a marketing point of view, everybody is a brand and everybody is a consumer. If you want to be popular in social networking you have to show yourself, tell what you’re doing, blog, post media. And it’s not about quantity it’s also about quality. It has to be good and often enough for people to be loyal followers. This is the normal organic way people interact with each other. This is why social networking sites are so popular right now, because it works. People feel comfortable with it because it feels natural.

Marketing has changed completely because the world has changed in the last few years. Time used to be a constant, but it isn’t right now. If you don’t change your perception of time, it may seem that people are moving so fast that we only care about the now. Which explains the NPS rating. Although it’s true that we live in the now more than ever, we still care about the past and the future. People differ in their opinions about how fast information should flow and that’s a hard question to tackle in marketing. If you take time perception into account when you calculate your target audience it gets a bit easier.

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