Gap growing between customer expectations and brand delivery

The index rates brands in various categories on their “ability to meet customers’ expectations better than the competition”.

This year it concluded that the gap between consumer expectations and brand delivery is driven almost entirely by emotional values: more emotionally-driven categories have higher expectations that escalate faster, while more rational categories have lower expectations and are more stable.

“Marketers acknowledge consumer expectations is a new area they need to address to guarantee engagement and profitability, shifting from a ‘try to do it better’ approach to one of ‘engage the consumer differently’,” the report said. “Unfortunately, without predictive emotional engagement metrics many brands try to ‘shoehorn’ values that they’ve seen work in other categories from their own. If they do that, they shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t work.”

The index was based on results from interviews with around 37,000 US consumers.