Marketing
Issue No. 20 - December/January 2005
Mark Bowden
An interview by David Corkindale
Mike Bowden is a very experienced market researcher who was involved with research for the first Magna and SA Brewing's new products in the 80s. Having invented Advertising Diagnostics, a new way of testing TV advertising, he set up in Sydney and in the 90s had major clients like Coke, Qantas, the Australian Tourist Commission, American Express and many others. His years of involvement with Customer Satisfaction surveys lead him to doubt their managerial adequacy.
DC: You ran a successful company called Customer Satisfaction for some years and I know you have been doing a study on this recently: What's the problem with surveying customer sastisfaction – a very common exercise that is built into so-called quality management procedures and even executive bonus schemes?
MB: Measuring customer satisfaction has become the Holy Grail by which many companies measure their performance.
Whilst, of course, this is a useful step in auditing performance, scores that are not declining may lead to management inertia in attempting to understand what underlies their real performance.
DC: What do you mean by "real performance"?
MB: Well, scores provided by these surveys are always skewed towards the positive end of the spectrum. For example, mean scores between 75% and 80% are common for most product categories, with little variation either side of these means.
DC: Yes, one of our Masters students got data on several hundred customer satisfaction surveys across many product and service categories and found that, although different industries have different levels of satisfaction, the scores were almost identical for companies competing with each other in an industry. Maybe this means that they are all as good, or as bad, as each other? What's the problem with this?
MB: Some have argued, and I would agree, that 'satisfaction' is a rather perfunctory measure and fails to capture im...
