When it comes to brands and their related experience, it’s critical that you KISS it. In other words, Keep It Simple Stupid.

The truth is most Customers want things easy, too. According to Siegel and Gale, a branding firm specializing in simplicity, Customers like brands that have simplicity as a key value.

After talking to over 12,000 respondents in eight different countries, they discovered there are four main reasons that simplicity is important to your brand.

1. It’s more expensive to be complex.  When an experience is complex, people gravitate toward the high-cost channels, i.e., the call center.
2. Customers value simplicity enough to pay more for it. Of those surveyed, 38% of them said they would pay more for a simpler experience.
3. Customers are more likely to recommend you to someone else when you keep it simple. The vast majority, 70% of respondents said they were more likely to recommend a brand with a simple experience.
4. Simple works for your bottom line. Looking at data since 2009, the portfolio including the simplest brands outperformed the major indexes by 170%.

Their findings are clear: Simple is where it’s at as it pertains to brands. And I would argue, simple is where it’s at as it pertains to the experience you provide for your brand as well.

Getting Your Brand Experience Back to Simple

Ask yourself this question: What is the brand experience you want to deliver? Do you know? If you were to go and ask your colleagues would they?

We ask these questions a lot. The surprising bit is the vast majority of the people at the organizations we help do not know the answer. Although, to be fair, there are times when they do know the answer—it’s just that everyone knows a different answer.

Knowing ONE answer is key to building a brand with an excellent experience. We call this answer a Customer Experience Statement, (CES) or a specific articulation of the experience your brand wants to deliver. Furthermore, as we know over 50% of the Customer Experience pertains to how a Customer feels, this statement should include specific emotions the Customer will feel during and after the experience with your brand.

However, we also want a strategy that drives value and provides a return to the bottom line. It is a business after all!

Based on the research undertaken by Siegel and Gale, simplicity to the experience drives much value to the bottom line. So when setting the strategy, simple should be a part of all brand conversations. The fact is, Customers are demanding—getting more so all the time—and they are demanding simple experiences. However, if you meet their simple demands, they reward you with word of mouth advertising, the gold standard for Brands.

So adding simple to your CES is paramount for brands today. Also paramount is the acceptance of simple as a value by the senior team because simple has implications (read: costs).

You need to design your brand to give people a simple experience. At the end of any experience with you, people should say their experience was easy. To evoke this response, you need to research it with an outside-in approach, design it with the goal in mind, implement it with a mind for change, and reward those who embrace it. Fail to do so, or fail to KISS it—you might simply kiss some of your loyal people goodbye.  

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in the following blogs:

•     Women Want Social Responsibility from Their Brands
•     7 Reasons Brand and CX Are Disconnected
•     Emotional Engagement and Brand Loyalty: Procter and Gamble Gets It…Do You?

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four bestselling books and an engaging keynote speaker.

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Consider this. ‘Ease of use’ of say website is a great output you might want to improve. Note the importance of the output being written in ‘attitudinal/ emotional’ language a customer might say to themselves. You may even relate NPS®/CSAT on this measure as correlating highly with some behavioural measure.

Company X now targets itself to improve its ‘ease of use scores’ by 10% on the year.

But what does ease of use mean?  Here we get to the nub of the issue.  Ease of use like most Customer Psychology measures is a ‘Formative’ variable. This means that like the concept of ‘a person’ it comprises many parts (legs, arms, etc) but those parts are generally independent of each other (when you raise your arm, your leg doesn’t rise as well!).

Why is this important?

Well if ‘ease of use’ is formed of many parts – the look of the website, the font size, the download speed, the click through speed, the way the content is written as well as internal variables such as how one department speaks to another... – but only the output matters, you cannot then seek to isolate its individual components in an ROI formulation.

If you were now to take the logic of Output ROI into this Input ROI you would be committing a fatal error.  Questions like, what is the ROI of the click through speed, the ROI of the font size or even the ROI of how one department speaks to another are ‘impossible’ to demonstrate in isolation even though they are critical to formulating a better ‘ease of use’ experience.

Hence, after you quantify your principles, you must move from Science mode to Art (creative) mode.

For a physical example consider a car. A customer could rate the ‘speed and performance’. You now might want to increase this output rating (or judgement) by say 15% year on year (i.e., quality performance improvements).  So far so good, but now if you move Output ratings into Input you might start looking at developing an ROI on the quality of the wires going into the engine. Of course, even though it is fundamental to performance, it is unrateable, an ROI would fail at this level and you would do nothing.

Management Implications

1. Be careful not to pull your Output NPS®/CSAT measures into your Input NPS®/CSAT measures.  This means you must identify the principles (key moments) that count in the mind of the consumer and then moving into creative mode to formulate the inputs (any ROI barrier at this level will be like trying to put an ROI figure to those wires in the engine). Of course, you still need to demonstrate success, but you do that through piloting.

2. Always base your ROI on customer impact, best judged by both hard metrics (spend now) and soft attitudinal metrics (CSAT/NPS® or Preference/ NEV (net emotional value) – what the customer actually thinks and feels about you (not the same as how much they spend!). This is important to avoid the ‘junk mail’ effect i.e., acquisition rates rise, but your customers hate you and their tendency to habitually stick with you or look for an alternative supplier becomes eroded (the propensity towards ‘search behaviour’).

3. Consider that customers only rate based on current knowledge, embed and pilot innovation. Making it up is highly valuable in a re-design. Culturally this means openness to innovation and a reduced dependency on the failings of quantitative research (see: The 10 Things wrong with Quantitative Research).

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What’s your companies Emotion Score

Over the past 7 years of analysing emotions, Beyond Philosophy has built up a wealth of experience on how to measure emotions and how to understand what drives emotion. However, there is no point in looking at emotion unless it drives value to your business. So with this in mind we have recently gone beyond individual client engagements to see if more generally there is a relationship between emotion and key KPIs Net Promoter®® and CSAT.

To do this we have developed a single emotion number called Net Emotional Value.

Introducing Net Emotional Value

Net Emotional Value is a single number that represents how your customers ‘on balance’ feel towards you. To put it simply NEV is the net of positive emotions less negative emotions.

A simple calculation based on our Emotion Scale for NEV would be:

NEV = Average of the Positive Emotions (Happy, Pleased, Trusting, Valued, Cared for, Safe, Focused, Indulgent, Stimulated, Exploratory, Interested, Energetic) – Average of the Negative Emotions (Dissatisfied, Frustrated, Disappointed, Irritated, Stressed, Unhappy, Neglected, Hurried)

It is slightly more complex if your business has positive attention emotions that drive value but the principle is the same.

Demonstrating the relationship between NEV, NPS® and CSAT

Critically when we take the NEV and correlate this to NPS® scores provided by each respondent we can derive an NEV/ NPS® relationship chart that should support or refute our central hypothesis that:

H1: The higher the NEV the Higher the NPS®

In addition we also have used this to test other value indicators such as Customer Satisfaction.

If this relationship holds, it means that there is an emotional underpinning behind Net Promoter® (i.e., loyalty) and Customer Satisfaction such that any change in one reflects in a change in the other. In other words for management, Satisfaction and Recommendation/ loyalty must be effected by emotional response not just rational response alone

The following chart shows our results:

• Naive represents those companies with a net negative emotional feel.
• Transactional represents those companies with a low emotional feel overall (neither positive nor negative) – hence low on positives and low on negatives.
• Enlightened represents those companies with a high positive emotional feel.
• Natural represents those companies with a very high positive emotional feel.

Note that these names also fit within the Beyond Philosophy typology of organisations based on how CE centric they are. We believe there is a direct link between emotional engagement and the degree to which the internal organisation is CE focused.

NEV/ NPS® relationship

Figure 1: Net Emotional Value and its relationship to NPS® percentages

As we can see from figure 1 the relationship between the profiles and the Net Promoter® percentages holds, forming a linear relationship between NPS® percentages and NEV scores.

Extrapolating this line in to the zone identified as key to high growth (40% and above on NPS®) we define a zone where the difference between positive average emotion scores and negative emotion scores is visually described as 5 points or above (i.e., an average of 2 out of 10 on negative emotions must be counterbalanced by an average score of at least 7 out of 10 on all positive emotions).

Our conclusion is that companies driving NPS® are focused on emotional engagement.

NEV/ CSAT relationship

Figure 2: Net Emotional Value and its relationship to Customer Satisfaction 

Net Emotional Value and its relationship to Customer Satisfaction

As we can see from the above figure 2 the relationship between the NEV profiles and customer satisfaction again holds a linear relationship. The relationship is less apparent than for Net Promoter® but nonetheless demonstrates continuity between growth in customer satisfaction and Net Emotional Value.

Interestingly we can see that there are two transactional states where the relationship is similar. So if a company is evoking strong positive AND negative emotions this can lead to a similar rate of growth in CSAT or NPS® as if the company was evoking little emotion at all! In other words, emotions need to be evoked and controlled.

In addition, we also see that the move from Transactional (low emotional feel overall) to Enlightened (a higher positive emotional feel) is less about controlling negatives (which are typically already at a low level in the Transactional type – which also has low positive emotions) than about generating more positive emotions i.e., enlightened states are more positively engaged emotionally.

It can be seen that the Natural state is hypothesised from this dataset as involving high positive emotions. Unsurprisingly, the dataset does not contain natural industry types (although there are types by company). Competitive confidence only allows us to express types by industry. For completion we include the Natural profile from one (undisclosed company, N=1,319).

Figure 3: Example Natural Profile

Example Natural Profile

In this case, we can see that the attention emotions are pulled up to the high level of the positive recommendation and advocacy emotion sets.

Management Implications

Understand your NEV score and diagnose how you can move your emotion scores higher.

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For some firms Customer Effort Score (CES) may appear as the next Net Promoter Score®. The compelling proposition is that firms should not obsess so much about ‘delighting’ customers as get the basics right! Make it easy or effortless for them. This is all well and good, but as with most things in life the law of ‘it depends’ applies. It depends on what you are selling, if it’s a theme park, focusing on the amount of effort customers expend is not really going to make for a great customer experience although the reverse may well be true if you are a poor call centre.

What you have to do is consider how, in your situation, Customer Effort Score is important to driving increased revenue or decreased costs into your business, as well as what drives CES. Just measuring a number will never tell you what to do anymore than continuously weighing yourself will tell you how to lose weight.

I like to think of CES as similar to the Beyond Philosophy Emotion Profile. Here we look at how high the positive customer emotions are and how low the negative. A company with high negative customer emotions is evoking feelings of, for instance, unhappiness or frustration. As a business you are creating if you like ‘high’ effort to do business with you. But this is only one half of the story, time and time again we quantify the effect and find that companies are actually pretty good on average, reducing the negatives. What they are bad at is understanding the positive emotions, and how to make an ordinary experience more emotionally engaging. Remember, these are not mutually exclusive, you feel good about Apple and are more likely to forgive their mistakes, you feel bad about Ryan Air and more likely to look for them.

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