What We Think, We Become. What Your Customers Think Is What The Marketplace Becomes.

Know these four things, and you will absolutely know what your brand’s customers think. If you know that, you will know the marketplace. You’ll lead it too.

1. What are the four behavioral drivers of loyalty and engagement in your category that describe how consumers view your category, how they compare brands, and how they will buy?

86% of the time marketers don’t know the correct order of importance of their brand's category drivers. They look at those through a brand “eye.” But consumers use a category “eye.” Failing to recognize the difference can be 100% fatal to brand success.    

2. What are the attributes, benefits, and values (ABVs) – emotional and rational – that make up each of the drivers, and what percent-contribution to brand engagement and loyalty does each ABV make?

On average, marketers miss more than 40% of the values that shape each driver. Those

are usually emotionally-based ABVs. Today’s marketplace is more emotional than rational, (70:30) so marketers can’t afford to miss even one!

3. What expectations do consumers hold for each of drivers in your category?

Marketers can guess at this. Only consumers really know, but you can’t just ask them because sometimes they don’t have the words to articulate their feelings and sometimes they just don’t want to. Brand Keys psychological measures can identify them. 

4. How well does your brand meet those consumer expectations? That’s a measure of how well your brand performs on the four drivers and, as it turns out, also a predictive, leading-indicator of how well your brand will do in the marketplace.

Our surveys provide quantitative assessments generalizable at the 95% confidence level. The questionnaire has a test/re-test reliability of 0.93 derived from National Probability Samples and has been used in B2C and B2B categories in over 35 countries around the world. Insights are identified 12 to 18 months before they show up in focus groups, tracking studies, or traditional brand research.

That said, the 22nd annual Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (CLEI) will be fielded again this January. We’ll be talking to over 50,000 consumers, men and women, 16 to 65 years of age, drawn from the nine U.S. Census Regions in ways that precisely answer those critical 4 questions. We’ll be examining 1,000 B2C and B2B brands in over 100 categories. We may already be measuring you – and your competitors.

The research, a combination of validated psychological research and some very smart higher-order statistical analyses, has been independently validated by organizations like the ARF, the ANA, and ESOMAR. More importantly, our findings have been shown to correlate with consumer behavior and brand profitability at levels of 0.85 or higher.

For more information about our correlated-to-behavior, emotionally-based, and validated brand insights, and to find out if your brand is or can be included in the 2018 CLEI, give Leigh Benatar a call (212-532-6028) or send him an email (leighb@brandkeys.com). He can answer any questions you may have about how the Customer Loyalty Engagement Index can help you discover critical answers to things every marketer should know about their brand.


Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.