Dr. Paul Marsden, LSE

Promoters vs. Influencers: Follow the Money

So Yahoo’s social network expert Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees, doesn’t rate ‘influencers’. Armed with computer models, he’s challenging the idea that innovation and marketing dollars work harder when they are invested with the trendsetting lead users in your category. Better to cast your net as wide as possible and cater to the mainstream majority (“mass seeding”) rather than focus on fickle influencers and even more fickle network effects.

NPS and Advertising: A Message from the President

A Frequently Asked Question I get about the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is about the relevance of NPS to marketing, particularly advertising.

And the answer lies in the findings of one of the most influential studies on advertising ever conducted – a study on the impact of advertising on Presidential Election campaigns by Columbia University.

To cut to the chase, the implication of the Columbia advertising research for NPS is that successful advertising is advertising that targets Promoters and gives them a reason to recommend your product or service to friends and acquaintances. Rather than inform the uninformed, persuade the unpersuaded, or remind the un-reminded, the essential task of advertising should be to activate Promoters into recommending.

The Hawthorne Effect: How to Get a Salary Rise with NPS

If you are one of the increasing number of companies adopting the NPS as a corporate objective, then your salary may already be linked to improvements in your company's Net Promoter Score (NPS). But here's a technique anyone can use to get a salary rise using the psychology behind the NPS.

To describe the technique – known as the Hawthorne Effect – it's best to go back in time… to the 1920's, and to the Hawthorne production plant of Western Electric, just outside Chicago. Researchers from MIT and Harvard were investigating the link between working conditions at the Hawthorne plant and employee productivity. To do this, they tested a number of new working conditions, inviting employees to give their opinion on whether they should be rolled out. The researchers found that whatever it was they asked employees to feedback on, employees recommended it.

'Listening Labs' – Unpacking Core Drivers and Barriers

Stay away from 9K! Seat 9K on Virgin Atlantic night flights, that is. It’s the funky bed seat next to the cool in-flight bar – great for partying, bad for sleeping…

Which perhaps explains a) why I’m blogging this at 4 am @ 37,000 feet somewhere between London and Mumbai and b) why the customer satisfaction questionnaire handed to me is in 100% Hindi, presumably so I don’t understand a word of it.

Which gets me thinking (sorry, we’ve got a stream of consciousness thing happening here) about satisfaction surveys, and their relationship to the Net Promoter Score (NPS). One way of looking at these two is to say that the NPS provides a validated and growth-correlated measure of the overall customer experience you are delivering, whilst satisfaction surveys, unpack the drivers of specific points of time within that experience.

The Ultimate Answer – on a Marketing Shoestring

Google ‘The Ultimate Question’ and Fred Reichheld’s new book currently comes in at #3. The first two slots are excerpts from the unconventional travel guide, The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which explains the little-known truth that the Earth is in fact a giant organic super-computer tasked with finding the Ultimate Question (to which the answer is of course, 42).

Fortunately, we now have Fred, which means we now know that the Ultimate Question is ‘Would you recommend us?’ But does this Ultimate Question (UQ) make understanding the Ultimate Answer of 42, or any other number that pops out of a Net Promoter survey for that matter, any easier?

That’s the problem with raw numbers, and some say NPS results; they’re of limited diagnostic value. Sort of like your doctor telling you your cholesterol level - but not telling you what do about it.