Introducing Forrester’s Brand Experience Index — Drive Growth With Both Brand And Customer Experience
Some things are simply better together: milk and cookies, cats and laser pointers, Instagram and avocado toast — or, if you’re a Frank Sinatra fan (or a “Married… with Children” junkie), it’s love and marriage. Let me tell you what else goes together “like a horse and carriage”: brand and customer experience.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not a new insight. At Forrester, we’ve been loudly declaiming the inextricability of brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX) for many years, but we have watched in dismay as marketing and customer experience activities in many companies continue to be compartmentalized and misaligned. Let us help you with that!
New Evidence Of The Multiplicative Value Of BX+CX
What’s new from Forrester is that we have clear and compelling evidence showing that brand experience and customer experience work more effectively together to generate financial value. Our analyses across various categories indicate that enhancing both BX and CX has a multiplicative revenue impact compared to advancing just one of them. For instance, in direct banks in the US, the combined revenue lift is 2.3x (versus 1.5–1.6x). The same multiplicative effect is observed in airlines, retail, auto, and numerous other industries.
A New Approach: A Single View Of Growth Among Prospects And Customers
What is also new from Forrester is a unified framework to measure and analyze BX and CX together, side by side. This framework provides a comprehensive view of how a brand performs with both its prospects and customers, how it compares to its peers, and what this means for its growth strategies in capturing market share and enhancing performance. We refer to this as our “growth grid.” This 2×2 grid positions a brand based on its performance with prospects and customers, categorizing brands from a specific sector into four growth quadrants, highlighting their current performance, and suggesting potential paths for improvement.
One Single View, Two Experience Indices
To construct these growth grids, we rely on two key indices:
- Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) measures customers’ perception of an experience. It measures how successfully a company delivers customer experiences that create and sustain loyalty and is calculated based on three components of CX quality: ease, effectiveness, and emotion.
- Forrester’s new BX Index measures prospects’ and customers’ perceptions of a brand. It measures brand equity, which accrues from the sum of all experiences. The index is based on three components: salience, fit, and trust.
The growth grid is much more than a theoretical construct. It allows us to assess the performance of specific brands in a category, helping them understand their position relative to the competition and fashion a strategy for the future. We’ve examined numerous applications of these growth grids, and Forrester clients can view our analysis of brands in the automotive and hospitality categories in the US and the banking markets in the UK and Singapore in the full report.
Use The Two Indices And Growth Grids To Drive Strategy
The calculation of the BX and CX indices and the mapping of the growth grid have multiple strategic applications for brands. They can be used to:
- Assess the competitive landscape and develop growth strategies.
- Evaluate the strength of different business lines.
- Compare the strengths of different brands within a portfolio.
- Illuminate pathways for improvement — say, from “lagging” to “leading.”
Forrester clients can view our analysis of banking products and retail department store chains as examples of utilizing growth grids as strategic tools.
Read our full report, Brand And Customer Experience Together Power Growth, to learn more about using Forrester’s CX Index in tandem with our BX Index to assess your competitive position and chart a course for growth and leadership.
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If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing these topics, please schedule time with me for an inquiry or guidance session. And if you are a Forrester client looking to host a strategy session on harmonizing BX and CX, please contact your account team or email me at dchatterjee@forrester.com.