I read with interest your comments on Word of Mouth, and I'm sure your conversation is representatative of most people. But you seem to be missing the point. Net Promoter works on the assumption that whether you're marketing engine oil, bog rolls or any product whatever, the most important task for the marketer is to influence word of mouth recommendations by users.

That is clearly rubbish. Most products are so infrequently discussed and recommended that the effect is negligible compared with other communications such as TV, press, outdoor etc.

For the rare products which have frequent WOM advocacy, the challenge is how can the marketer influence it. The main method that Net Promoter advocates is to hire a team of fake advocates who create phoney blogs and annoy people at cocktail parties discussing their favorite bog roll or engine oil.

Out of interest, did you recommend bog roll, engine oil, custard, potatoes or any other products to your friends at the weekend gathering? And in those cases when you did make a recommendation, would your comments have been influenced by a marketing director for that product, or were your views your own and beyond the manipulative reach of marketing?

Net Promoter is important only when positive WOM advocacy can be influenced by marketing, and on that basis it's about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

Thanks for your speedy response Robert.

Your point about applicability to certain types of products is very well made, and not something that is often picked up. I'm from a B2B world, where purchasing decisions very often need to be informed by research, endorsements or even formal references. So I may have skated past your point. And I wouldn't disagree that there are other subtleties to Net Promoter also.

But I'd still have issues with some of the other points raised.

No, I didn't discuss really mundane products last weekend - but if I had it would have been based upon my experience of using them, not whether or not they had slick adverts. Isn't that the point of recommending something to a friend?

Perhaps we are coming at this from different directions.

My own experience is that companies I meet are first seeking to use Net Promoter to help them drive improvements in the customer experience they deliver (which has to be a good thing for both consumers and marketers). Only when, or if, that has been achieved, they then might seek to amplify their 'natural' Net Promoter halo effect through other marketing techniques.

In our own sphere we are tasked with building communities among users of different types, who are often early adopters, and ideally - through a great experience of the product - then become advocates. Only after that point do we seek amplify their positive value externally through a variety of techniques (many of them being traditional marketing methods).

Reading your comment seems to lumber Net Promoter with the blame for the worst excesses of the burgeoning 'WOM industry' (and I'd stand beside you in condemning those dodgy techniques).

I read your comments with interest and would agree that the "burgeoning WOM industry" is capable of significant excesses. I'd bracket Net Promoter with that, in view of the phoney claimS made about itS widespread effectiveness.

You comment that Net Promoter helps drive improvements to customer experience, but how? If you have a score 5% below that of a competitor, how do you figure out what to change? Net Promoter doesn't tell you what's wrong, it simply says SOMETHING is wrong. It's as useful as a chocolate fireguard!

If you have a great product that's also novel and interesting, then people will talk about it anyway, but if your product sucks then spending money on Net Promoter won't help.

It would be luddite of me to say that the new marketing techniques have no value, but their value needs to be assessed objectively and I would be very interested to see some sound evidence on how you can influence cusotmer behaviour via the new techniques.

Robert, are we at cross purposes here?

Net Promoter isn't a tool for marketers. Its for the people who labour inside the guts of large organizations trying to grind out improvements in customer experience.

Its a simple, instinctively correct, way of assessing customer sat. The bigger debate seems to hinge upon its validity in linking that score to business out-performance. Surely that was the debate that was taking place in the mycustomer.com article. I'll leave that debate to others.

I do agree an aggregated Net Promoter score for a whole organization doesn't give you much in the way of actionable data, and probably has limited comparability across companies, countries and cultures. But a proper Net Promoter initiative is deployed at multiple customer touch points within a service delivery lifecycle, in order to fire back immediate and actionable data into the hands of the very worker bees who may be in a position to fix the problem.

(The alternative is the annual big fat customer sat study, that is 18 months old by the time it reaches the people who have to make changes based upon it. And invariably needs a minder to explain and 'interprete' it for them).

You say: "If you have a great product that's also novel and interesting, then people will talk about it anyway," Correct.

And if you use Net Promoter to monitor your customer sat, then you'll probably have a great NPS too. In fact you may even tell your marketing dept., that the current product is great, customers seem to love it, so why don't they go and get more awareness of it...

You also say: "but if your product sucks then spending money on Net Promoter won't help." Well yes it will. Because if its part of a proper Net Promoter initiative designed to drive improvements in Customer Experience, it'll tell your product, service and/or operations people what's broken so they can fix it.

Robert, I suspect its just you and I will ever travel this far down this post.

Can we call it a draw?

Good comments!

It's one thing to know your Net Promoter Score, and another thing to do something about it. Net Promoter blogger, Jeanne Bliss, author of Chief Customer Officer, has some applicable blogs. Here are the links:

We Know Our Net Promoter Score. Now What?
http://netpromoter.typepad.com/jeanne_bliss/2007/05/coming_soon.html

Mining the Gold: Listening Hard to “Detractors”
http://netpromoter.typepad.com/jeanne_bliss/2007/07/mining-the-gold.html

Another resource are the blogs from the Net Promoter Conferences. Multiple bloggers wrote key takeaways from ~ 2 dozen sessions delivered by Net Promoter practitioners (yes! they are doing more than calculating a score, or else there wouldn't be much of a story!) including T-Mobile, LEGO, HSBC, Schwab, Intuit, Philips, GE, T-Mobile, IBM, and more.

Here's the link to the most recent conference blog:
http://netpromoter.typepad.com/npc_london_2007/