Does it really matter?

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For all the energy and investment that companies put into marketing and researching their products and services, it can be hard to acknowledge that, in most cases, people just don’t care that much about the brands.

So when customer engagement agency Psona commissioned the Foresight Factory, the aim of the research was to cut to the heart and find out what matters most to consumers about brands. 

The project involved online surveys with 2,000 consumers segmented into five age groups – from Generation Z to the ‘silent’ generation ( 75+) – and looking at 10 sectors. 

“We believe most brands don’t matter to people and it’s actually really hard to create communications that truly have an impact. But we also had a hypothesis that it was the small brand behaviours – micro-moments, to borrow Google’s language – that make up a customer experience, which cumulatively drove people to love or hate brands; with a less than forgiving space in the middle,” says Ellie Gauci, executive strategy director at Psona. 

From the research, Psona identified six drivers that make brands matter to people: they recognise me; support me; inform me; connect me; entertain me; and inspire me. Help, inform and reward were the vital components of brand expectation.

Delving into the findings, however, resulted in some of the more interesting insight, with one thing in particular standing out: a noticeable gap between people’s expectations and actual delivery. “One of the central questions in the research asked people to rate how brands performed against 18 statements that we hypothesised as defining ‘good brand behaviours’,” explains Gauci.

With brands under-delivering in one of the areas that matters most to people – informing them – this then played into issues of data use and data transparency. When concerns about data transparency were scrutinised by age, the biggest gap was found among the silent generation. Gauci thinks the negative stories about how some brands and charities have exploited older people is one reason for this, as is their greater caution when handing over personal data. 

“Gen Y have grown up with making their data public and brands have focused on capturing them as an audience in the past 10 years, building their customer experience infrastructures around them, which has shown them the value of sharing their data. 

“They also know that they have control to withdraw their data at any point, delete profiles, make subject access requests to big brands and have URLs removed from Google searches. So their expectations adjust accordingly.”

But it’s not just data transparency issues that concern older people. Despite often being more brand loyal, companies are failing to reward them for loyalty. So, is it that brands simply do not care about this group?

“The marketing industry is obsessed with adopting the new shiny technology. So much so that they, perhaps, alienate these older audiences. For example, the benefits of joining a loyalty programme, such as M&S Sparks (whose core audience is probably older), can only be seen by logging into the online account area and choosing the promotions/offers in which you want to participate. Other loyalty programmes are run through apps, the mechanics of which are built around familiarity with this technology, such as location-based targeting of loyalty rewards via apps like O2 Priority. 

“Our research told us simple gestures that recognise loyalty – such as saying thank you – and straightforward mechanics, like a coffee stamp card, work a treat for making people feel their custom is valued,” says Gauci.

If older consumers want their loyalty acknowledged, younger groups want a two-way dialogue. The rise of social media, instant messaging and video chat technology means people expect to converse with brands and be heard.

The value exchange for this dialogue is that younger people are happy to be rated as a customer ( 48% Gen Z and 54% Gen Y, compared with 33% of the over 75-year-olds).

Overall, one of the key things to come out of the research is just how clued-up shoppers are today.

Gauci says: “We’re in the era of ‘savvy consumers’. People know what’s possible with technology and data and they are unwilling to accept brands that don’t do what they know is possible: respecting real loyalty; being transparent with people’s personal data and using it to inform and validate choices; setting up timely reminders around services; and using their previous behaviour to suggest new opportunities or create new products.”