Earlier this year I launched a research study, Leading by Recommendation, which I conducted together with Alain Samson of Enterprise LSE. It aimed to identify how actively UK brands are being recommended and the characteristics of highly recommended brands.
As an ex marketer of everything from lager to puppies (sorry Toilet Paper) it was the results from the FMCG sector that I most eagerly awaited. I’d always understood that the FMCG sector was intrinsically low interest and hence mass scale awareness strategies were always the most effective. Our results indicated something different.
Using the Net Promoter Score as our base, we isolated those who claimed to be strong promoters of individual FMCG brands (at a brand by brand level) and then looked at how often these individuals actively promoted that brand. We found that on average, across the 50 or so brands we researched, more than half (55%) had actively promoted their recommended brand to someone over a three month period.
This was interesting. What was even more fascinating was who lead the way in activating their advocates. Our most actively recommended FMCG brands in the UK turned out to be:-
1. Activia Yogurts (76.9%)
2. Kelloggs Special K (76%)
3. Lucozade Sport (72.7%)
Looking behind these results and those of the other 120 brands in our study, we found that the leaders in just about every industry sector met a set of clear criteria. We called these criteria the 4C’s of advocacy activation – Cause, Community, Contagious Stories and Coverage.
We believe this study has many implications but probably the most fundamental is that it conclusively demonstrates that brand advocacy (recommendation) can be systematically built. With a 7% increase in NPS score equating to a 1% increase in growth this we believe has profound implications for FMCG marketing strategy in the future.
Who cares if your customers say they will recommend your brand… if they never get round to doing so. Realising the potential of advocacy requires active advocates, but can you influence this? This was the question we set out to answer in our research project ‘Leading by recommendation’. We studied 120 brands in the UK and 4000 customers. We found significant differences in activation levels between brands in the same sectors. We also found striking similarities in the way these brands approached their marketing. We distilled these findings into a model, the 4C’s of advocacy activation. A model which can be applied to build advocacy, build activation and build the momentum of brands.
