Is Net Promoter Score a credible event metric?

We’ve been having an interesting discussion in the EMMC community this month - debating the merits of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as an event metric. 

For the uninitiated, NPS is a widely used business measure in which people are asked: “How likely are you to recommend _____(the brand/product/service) to others?”

Respondents are asked to rate their likelihood to recommend from 0-10 (0 being lowest). The score itself is derived from subtracting the percentage of people who score 0-6 (so-called ‘detractors’) from the percentage of people who score a 9-10 (‘promoters’). People who score a 7 or 8 are considered ‘passives’ and not included in the score calculation.

That means a Net Promoter Score can range from -100 to +100.  For example, if 90% of people are brand detractors and only 5% are promoters, a brand’s NPS would be -85 (5-90). If you reverse that - where only 5% of people are in the detractor bucket and 90% are promoters, the score would be +85 (90-5).

I happened to be at an early 2000’s marketing conference when Fred Reichheld of Bain & Associates announced the NPS methodology, which was detailed in a Harvard Business Review article called "The Only Number You Need to Grow" (and later fleshed out in the book The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth). I was new to measurement and, frankly, totally blown away. Reichheld and his team had demonstrated through long-term data analysis how a customer measurement could serve as a predictor of business growth.

There’s no question that this singular moment kicked off a career journey that eventually led to my founding the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition (in 2017). When the EMMC first began, we didn’t adopt NPS as an event metric, but we did focus on credible measures that connected to business impact - and these remain core to our recommended methodologies.

NPS is now widely used, though there’s some debate when it comes to its universality. Reichheld himself has updated his thinking, and he now refers to it as the Net Promoter System (vs. ‘score’). One common evolution, a secondary open-ended question, “Why did you answer in this way” - which I think is useful because it gives the brand useful qualitative data which can be used to inform customer service improvements.

One thing that hasn’t changed is how the methodology is meant to be used: as a customer loyalty measure. Net Promoter Score was NOT developed as a brand perception metric. Unfortunately, some analysts misuse the term and there isn’t clarity on how to use the methodology as part of a broad measurement approach, which brings us to the EMMC discussion about NPS as a measure of events.

So, let’s look at it.

NPS is a customer loyalty measure. Therefore, the question is designed for customers of a brand - not prospects or other audiences. An example: I am unlikely to recommend a restaurant to you that I’ve never been to, or a film I have not seen. We therefore suggest asking only current customers of a brand/product/service to respond to NPS questions. 

It does make sense to ask customers attending an event or activation their likelihood to recommend the brand at hand - especially if you can ask before and after as an indicator that the event is impacting customer loyalty (by showing how the before/after scores differ).

There is also a second potential usage model when it comes to events, especially events that happen more than once. By asking all attendees in a post-event survey their likelihood to recommend the event to others, we may be able to provide a credible indicator of event loyalty and future attendance.

And, in both instances, don’t forget to ask the follow up (optionally), “please tell us why you gave this response”, which can provide useful insight and ability to understand nuances.