Avis, Sprint, and Nokia lead in customer loyalty - Consumerism - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), April, 2002

Brands that best reflect customer values and concerns were the top performers in the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Leaders List for winter, 2001-02. The top 10 finishers were Avis, Sprint, Nokia, Budweiser, Motorola, Ritz-Carlton, AT&T, Miller Genuine Draft, Canon copiers, and Google. The semi-annual survey of 16,000 consumers measures loyalty for 145 brands, recognizing companies that are doing things right and will successfully weather the recession. "Customer loyalty measurements have always been leading indicators of profitability, but they take on even more importance in a recession," Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a New York City-based brand and customer loyalty consultancy, points out. "Marketers can't realistically rely on `business as usual' methods any longer.

"The ability to address customer values in terms of product and service delivery and brand differentiation eludes most companies. Consumer shifts are happening faster today than brands are addressing them. If recent market history has shown us anything, it's that if you can't exceed or, at the very least, meet consumer expectations, you create a high rate of infidelity among your customer base. That's no way to profitably manage a business."

The leaders represent brands that best resonate with the values of their customers in their specific industry categories. "These are companies that recognize the import of truly understanding the values and expectations of customers," Passikoff notes. "In the last century, and in better economic times, it was acceptable for companies to be positioned only for promise. Today, investors are more demanding, customers more fickle, and profits more difficult to achieve. And it doesn't help that brands find themselves in the middle of a weakened economy. Executives at more and more companies are recognizing that actual brand differentiation, and the ability to leverage customer loyalty, is the primary means by which they will be able to position themselves for profitability."

The Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Awards were created in 1998 to acknowledge organizations that are most successful at creating loyal customers. The awards are based on research studies in the spring and fall that probe customers relationships with approximately 150 leading brands in 26 industry categories, including hotels, airlines, mobile phones, long distance providers, fast food restaurants, and beer and soda brands. In each, researchers conduct 16,000 brand assessments among adult Americans who are users of the brands in question.

"The methodology reveals what people really feel, not just what they say they feel about the brands they use," Passikoff says. "Invariably, the brands that rank highest will show the greatest profits, even in a recession. To succeed, companies must find ways to track, predict, and preemptively respond to changing customer loyalty values and expectations. Traditional research tools, while statistically reliable, no longer provide the sensitivity or differentiation necessary to allow companies to profitably compete. Companies must be able to slip behind consumers' unconscious defenses with a method that tells more about them than their alleged `intentions.' These assessments provide corporations with a real `bang-for-the-buck' analysis, and in a recession you really can't hope for more than that."