Sky and Virgin Media Beat BT and TalkTalk for Brand Experience

A new consumer survey of brand experience in the United Kingdom’s telecoms sector has found that Sky (Sky Broadband) and Virgin Media both ranked at or above the sector average (80+ out of 140), while TalkTalk and BT were found languishing at the bottom.

Apparently the survey, which was conducted by design agency Rufus Leonard with a sample of 2,018 respondents (said to be “nationally representative of the UK population“), screened all those involved to ensure they had recent experience (last 6 months) of each brand in the survey. Sadly it’s unclear what this screening process involved or how they quantified “recent experience“.

The agency then selected 10 brands for the telecoms sector, five established brands and five “challenger brands“, based on longevity and revenue. At this point the respondents were asked to measure five facets of experience that consumers have when interacting with a brand (i.e. ‘sense’, ‘feel’, ‘think’, ‘do’ and ‘connect’) to compare how well brands are engaging them.

We assume all this made more sense and was better explained to those being surveyed than it does to us, although we do understand the measure of ‘think‘ and ‘feel‘ quite well.. oh yes. Some ISPs really do make you think unhealthy thoughts and that can cause a person feel very angry and frustrated. Is that about right? Hmm.

Anyway, the agency then used all this research to track the “impact of a brand’s experience on customer loyalty, on why people choose and remain with brands“, which apparently involved questions about future purchase preferences and the likelihood to recommend. Somehow all of this resulted in a score..

The study suggests, perhaps rather obviously, that the bigger and most well established brands are probably suffering due to “issues around customer service” (i.e. polite words for having a large number of unhappy customers) and that the way to solve this is by “clearly communicating brand purpose and making experiences more tangible” (i.e. try to correct the service problems and then tell everybody that you’re actually really good now and not at all rubbish anymore, honest).

Laurence Parkes, Chief Strategy Officer at Rufus Leonard, said:

“Our findings are consistent with an industry that still prioritises acquisition at the expense of retention, resulting in a lack of investment in clear brand purposes and their corresponding brand experiences. This lack of differentiation across the category is a real challenge for these brands, and it’s damaging their retention efforts.”

End.