Even the simplest metrics require forensic analysis
Marketing metrics have a tendency to tell you how you’re doing without telling you what to do and to exist within something infinitely more complex.
Marketers at US budget airline JetBlue had a conundrum. Net promoter scores (NPS) from passengers departing from a single gate at Philadelphia Airport were consistently well below the average of NPS scores for the airline overall. What was going on at that gate?
NPS is a simple metric. It takes the proportion of those who would enthusiastically recommend the brand to others and subtracts from it the proportion of those who would definitely not – either side of a ballast of neutrals in between.
It is very much a brand metric, capturing, in theory at least, all the practical and associational facets that contribute to the overall consumer experience. JetBlue’s scores were generally strong – so naturally, the airline’s marketers looked at reasons for how the brand might be under-performing at this one departure point.