Incentives Rarely Needed for Customer Feedback
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Feb 18, 2011
Justin Cooper, co-founder of Passenger, has a great quote about offering incentives:
When you approach customer collaboration with incentives (cash, coupons, free product), you are doing your brand a disservice, because you are falsely motivating and therefore diluting the underlying value of the relationship with your customers....
By engaging them, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it. Companies that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and ultimately endure the test of time.
Forging a collaborative relationship with your most valued customers is critical to the efficacy of your brand. As Kozinets notes, it's not about diluting the underlying value of your relationship through offering incentives. If you simply take the time to ask your customers what they want, they will tell you. If it sounds simple, it's because it is.
Like Justin, we rarely advocate setting up explicit incentive management systems specifically for customer panels and communities. For B2B research, customers know that providing feedback will strengthen the offerings of the company they do business with; therefore, they don't need added incentives. For B2C research, the sheer potential size of house panels makes for a light touch on any individual consumer, requiring no incentives to produce robust response rates. Of course, if you already have a points system in place for consumers, you can leverage that to provide points for completed surveys and other forms of community participation, but it's not necessary for success.
When surveying noncustomers, or when building a panel that solely exists to field surveys from many brands, incentives are essential. But don't confuse that need as a requirement for customer research. As Justin says, to do so is to do your brand a disservice.
See also: