Top Brands in Customer Engagement Survey

The direct marketing agency, Targetbase Claydon Heeley, today announces the findings of an extensive Customer Engagement Survey. The survey, undertaken through online research company CCB fast.MAP Ltd, explored the relationship between ten top UK brands and their customers – aiming to understand how customers value brands and the impact this has for the brand on their value as customers.

The findings unearthed some new and thought provoking statistics, such as, on average, the brands in the survey are failing to engage with a staggering 77% of their customers.

Why does Customer Engagement matter?

Traditional marketing is changing and marketers need to find new ways to engage with their customers. Today’s customers are more in control than ever before and for a brand to understand their customer, they need to understand the motivation behind the behaviour. TBCH’s survey set out to prove that the more customers are understood by a brand, and therefore engaged with a brand, the more likely they are to repurchase and recommend to others.

Steve Grout, UK CEO, comments, “At Targetbase Claydon Heeley we have a commitment to data driven marketing and have specific expertise in CRV (Customer Relationship Value). We knew that an appropriate in-depth and independent survey could look at the brand/customer relationship from both sides, and in doing this, we have revealed that success for one brand looks very different to success for another”.

The Survey and the Brands

TBCH’s online quantitative survey was conducted amongst 1,200 nationally representative respondents from CCB fast.MAP’s Consumer Voice panel. From the data gathered, TBCH plotted a CRV (Customer Relationship Value) matrix for each brand. As this is the first time this survey has taken place, a cross section of market-leading brands within different sectors were selected: Barclays, Boots, British Gas, BT, Easyjet, Google, Lloyds TSB, MBNA, M&S and the Post Office (Royal Mail).

Key Findings

The top three performing brands, Boots, M&S and Google, were those that scored highest for Customer Engagement – they all achieved top scores for different reasons.
Boots’ high score for the emotional engagement of “makes time to reward me” propelled it into the top three, however M&S achieved its top three spot by scoring highly for the emotional elements of “relates to me best” and “cares about more than just my money”. Google found itself in the top three by scoring highly for the rational engagement element “best at what they do”.

Boots finds itself in the top three performing brands because its score for the emotional element (“This brand makes time to reward me”) is 317.4% higher than the average score achieved by the nine other brands in the survey. In other words, they outperform the average score for all other brands, by excelling in one particular area. Conversely, Lloyds TSB scores little more than the average in most elements of engagement, and comes fifth with their engagement score.

Interestingly, however, the survey highlighted that for customers, reward is about more than tactical promotions. Easyjet achieved the highest score for sending customers deals and offers at 73.6%, but only scored 8.8% for “makes time to reward me”. Boots, on the other hand, scored a lower 64.7% for sending customers deals and offers, but scored a high 45.4% for “makes time to reward me”.
MBNA achieved the lowest score for customer engagement in the survey. It scored the lowest for the rational engagement elements of “is best at what they do” and “represents good value”. It also showed the lowest score for the emotional elements of “show they understand me” and “relates to me best”.

Summary

This survey is a call to action for brands. UK customers are five times more likely to buy a brand if it has been recommended (European Advocacy Study – Nov 2007). Steve Grout stresses, “This striking statistic is reinforced by our survey – what customers think and feel, and therefore say about a brand, can be as powerful as what they do”.

As an industry expert, TBCH recommend that in order to fully engage with their customers, all brands must understand the true levers of engagement. Today’s financial climate and commercial pressures leave brands reluctant to “miss out” on trends in marketing strategies. If a brand is brave enough to edit a traditional marketing programme to create a more bespoke offering they have the opportunity to truly create a unique and appropriate offering for their customers. To help motivate brands, TBCH found that a 1% increase in engagement leads to 3% increase in customer value – a very tangible and real reason to take action.

Customer Engagement has a key role to play within all marketing strategies and through the application of a Customer Relationship Value model index, this can be better understood.

For the full result http://www.mi-comms.co.uk/webdocs/TBCH.pdf