What does marketing have to do with a carambola (better known as starfuit)?
If you are reading this, it is quite possible that you are wondering what carambola is, given the name of my company, Carambola Consulting. Carambola is another name for starfruit, a juicy, flavorful tropical fruit that has the shape of a star when sliced. Native to Southeast Asia, in a Vietnamese proverb entitled “The Golden Starfruit Tree”, the carambola symbolizes good fortune to someone who is both generous and kind. Ultimately, in this proverb, the core idea is around the golden rule – treating others as you would like to be treated (and the long-term damage of greed). The golden rule as an idea may be an obvious personal practice, but as companies are slowly coming to understand, it can also be good business practice.
The Net Promoter System (NPS) is a well-known system for understanding customer feedback and loyalty. As the NPS founder Fred Reichheld shares in a Harvard Business Review article, “each time you live up to the Golden Rule, your reputation is enhanced; each time you fail, it is diminished. And the mathematics of long-term financial success — revenues, profits, cash flow — square perfectly with this scorecard.” Everyone wants to be treated with dignity, honor, and respect, and customers have come to expect it. We’ve all seen the social media posts of individuals who were not treated this way as customers – and how it can have negative consequences for brands given the digital platforms that now exist for poor experiences to be widely broadcast. NPS is an excellent tool to measure the frequency with which you are treating your customers in the right way – the way you’d like to be treated.
The goal of for-profit companies is profitable growth. Too often, the short-term goal (e.g., quarterly earnings) might be prioritized over longer-term results, leading to actions that can erode customer loyalty and reduce the implementation of the golden rule with customers (examples include cutting back operations to the detriment of customer experience or charging additional fees for something to drive revenue). But, when companies can focus on generating more “promoters” and reducing “detractors”, and truly operationalize the feedback they receive, they will have more loyal customers who are buying more and referring friends – driving more company profits in the long run.
In the non-profit space, which is focused on impact vs profits, awareness among core targets and funding both need to grow in order to create scalable impact. Given the limited marketing budgets non-profits have, positive word of mouth and recommendations from existing supporters are critical in fueling growth. This NPS podcast from a few years ago shares a bit of how and why implementing NPS in non-profits is different, as I share some of my experiences at both Teach For America and City Year. Although different in its implementation, the core tenets of NPS remain the same.
Consumer insights are critical in developing successful marketing strategies. Marketers should use NPS as a rich feedback mechanism to ensure that they are capturing customer insights and operationalizing the feedback to improve customer perception. NPS can be misunderstood, often thought of as just a metric or a survey, and not as the complex, actionable tool that it is. How is your company or organization treating others? How do you know and how are you measuring it? How do existing supporters feel about you and are they likely to recommend you? Why or why not? How are you taking the feedback to improve and putting actions into practice in your organization? What systems and strategies do you have in place to create more brand champions?
When we treat others with dignity, honor, and respect, it puts more good out into the world and we’ll want to share it with others. We could all use more of that, and a little more starfruit.