To Keep Your Customers,

108 Harvard Business Review May 2012

hbr.org

IllustratIon: andré da loba

They don’t want a “relationship” with you. Just help them make good choices. by Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman
May 2012 harvard business review 109

Keep It Simple

To Keep Your CuSToMerS, Keep iT SiMple

arketers see today’s consumers as web-savvy, mobileenabled data sifters who pounce on whichever brand or store offers the best deal. Brand loyalty, the thinking goes, is vanishing. In response, companies have ramped up their messaging, expecting that the more interaction and information they provide, the better the chances of holding on to these increasingly distracted and disloyal customers. But for many consumers, the rising volume of marketing messages isn’t empowering—it’s overwhelming. Rather than pulling customers into the fold, marketers are pushing them away with relentless and ill-conceived efforts to engage. That’s a key finding of Corporate Executive Board’s multiple surveys of more than 7,000 consumers and interviews with hundreds of marketing executives and other experts around the world (for more detail, see the sidebar “About the Research”). Our study bored in on what makes consumers “sticky”—that is, likely to follow through on an intended purchase, buy the product repeatedly, and recommend it to others. We looked at the impact on stickiness of more than 40 variables, including price, customers’ perceptions of a brand, and how often consumers interacted with the brand. The single biggest driver of stickiness, by far, was “decision simplicity”—the ease with which consumers can gather trustworthy information about a product and confidently and efficiently weigh their purchase options. What consumers want from marketers is, simply, simplicity. Consider the marketing activities of two digital camera brands. Brand A’s search engine