Moving from ‘detractor’ to `passive’ status happens through simply elevating your public profile through advertising and social media, increasing your ratings almost regardless of its content or whether ads and posts are viewed.
In Step 1, the 1st step of a 4 Part Series, we discussed eliminating service failure risks (drivers of negative Net Promoter Scores), poor value for money perceptions, and avoiding ethical breaches.
In this article, we discuss Step 2, Building market presence – growing awareness and salience through relevant investments in advertising and media.
Sheer salient awareness (as opposed to the feeling of being a total stranger) gets your company on the first rung of having a positive corporate reputation entitling it to a degree of stature that is a critical underpinning of a good reputation and `promoter’ status. We are not talking about brand awareness (ever heard of) though that matters too. We are talking about salient awareness or mental availability, meaning that a company or brand is well known, visible, active, and current.
Advertising and social media presence build familiarity. With salient awareness comes familiarity and a sense of comfort and liking. Familiar brands are also perceived to be more popular.
According to our research, building salient awareness helps move companies and brands into the weak `passive’ rather than `detractor’ status. A movement to `passive’ status can happen by simply elevating your public profile through advertising and social media activity. Advertising and social media investments can increase your NPS almost regardless of their content or whether ads and posts are viewed. There is neuroscientific evidence that brand name registration in peripheral awareness matters (called the ‘peripheral route of persuasion’). (A proviso for increases in advocacy is, of course, that the brand or company does not have negative baggage.)
Test how likely you would recommend on a scale of 0 to 10 a brand or company rarely in the media or with word of mouth like Minties (not advertised for some time) or Suez (hardly known to the general public) against a company with a consistent or increasing presence like Kit Kat and CSL. Of course, advertising and social media activity is not always needed for salient awareness to impact. Think about Zoom, for example. Not very many people had ever heard of Zoom before word of mouth started, and its presence in the news increased during 2020. In the early stages of its emerging salience, the company will have started its journey to ‘passive’ status. Next, Zoom consolidated higher NPS scores with increasing users and with other factors coming into play.
Salient awareness alone is not sufficient to gain high NPS scores. A start point towards the next step of increasing the level of ‘promoters’ is to build a better sense of what you do as well as what you stand for.
Step 4: Achieving admiration through innovations that transform people’s lives and providing thought leadership. Coming soon. Follow INSIDE STORY Research on Linked In.
To be continued. Please contact the Liane Ringham CEO of Inside Story at [email protected] for more about driving positive advocacy and stronger reputations.