66. Try the NPS

66

TRY THE NPS

When fi lling in research questionnaires, people are notoriously positive about their own behaviour. I say notoriously, because some organisations have found themselves on the rocks after failing to question high scores as an accurate prediction of their product’s future success.

One of my marketing students ran a research project for a tobacco company in Eastern Europe when the countries were still part of the Communist bloc. They asked smokers which brands they bought. The results said that more people smoked one particular western brand than they had ever sold cigarettes in that country, even accounting for grey imports. The research respondents had liked to think of themselves as the kind of people who would smoke that brand, if only they could get hold of it, so they ticked “yes”.

Then there’s the tendency to give a higher score just to be kind. When people answer “how likely are you to buy our toothpaste?” with a 7 out of 10, that does not mean they are 70% likely to do it; it means they probably won’t touch it, but they didn’t want to be rude.

The idea NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. it’s an ingenious (trademarked) way to found out what people really think of your brand, developed by Fred Reichheld and described in his book The Ultimate Question. The question is: How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

Reichheld worked out that asking people if they would recommend it was more likely to get a straight answer, that 7 or 8 out of ten are “ Passive or Neutral” and that 0 to 6 are negative, “Detractors”. Only a 9 or a 10 is a positive answer, “Promotors”. Your NPS is your positive score, minus your negative score. NPS has been adopted as a method to fi nd out the answer to the one big question: How do your customers feel about your brand?

There is a debate about what the answer means and about whether it can predict what to do next. One really useful thing to measure is if it goes up or down over time.

In practice • It’s a great place to start. • Using the NPS will give you an idea of how much work you have to do on improving your branding before your customers will recommend you. • If you get a good result, then you’re doing something right, but don’t rest on your laurels, do more of it. You might still want to follow up on the reasons behind the negatives. If you get a bad result, look into deeper ways to identify the issues.