Using Net Promoter Score to Check in on your Brand Health

When it comes to brand health, there is a whole array of metrics and calculations that can be used to help measure it. Each have their own merits, and areas of possible insights about a brand. In this article, we will focus on one of these techniques, net promoter score (NPS). By outlining specifically how an NPS score comes about, we can see why this particular technique is such a favourable one for many leaders in a market.

Working out your NPS is a relatively simple process. Firstly, you need to survey a group of people with a simple question of how likely, on a scale of 1-10, they are to recommend your brand to someone else. It is then a case of adding together all the responses that respond nine or ten, this is your promoter score. The next step is to add together all those who ranked it from one to six, this is known as a detractor score. You then want to take away this detractor score from your promoter score, leaving you with your net promoter score.

Firstly, the simplicity of this calculation is a huge advantage in itself. The hardest part of the process is finding a group large and diverse enough to answer the question accurately. Once this is done, the actual gathering of information should not be too complex, as there is only one question with a limited amount of responses. This means processing the results from this survey can be a quick and easy process. As a result, NPS is both informative of a brand’s positioning and not going to drain too many resources.

Personal recommendations, especially those that occur through word of mouth, can often be hard to trace for a company. Yet the importance of personal recommendations is huge to a brand, as it shows a particularly high level of brand loyalty. An NPS though, gives an estimate of personal recommendations for your brand. Recommendations like these can be seen as higher than something such as purchase intent. This is because purchase intent only goes as far as whether an individual will purchase, or repurchase, a certain brand for themselves. While recommendations of a brand goes a step further than this, as it shows an individual is willing, to some extent, to put their own reputation on the line. Which, for many, goes beyond what they are just willing to get for themselves.