Customer Alignment Score (CAS)

Your CAS, or Customer Alignment Score, is a great way to measure brand sentiment, and more importantly, get a numerical metric from pure, open, honest anecdotal feedback. Think of this like the little brother, or favorite uncle, to NPS. As we know, marketing efforts should always ladder up to the commercial goals of an organization, but if you're looking for a quick and effective customer data point to see how your messaging is landing, try this brief technique below, which is (IMHO) one of the most important metrics a marketing team can track.

I reckon a good chunk of you haven't taken the time to do it at your company, and regardless of the company’s size, it’s a vitally important data point for the long-term health of your brand and its product/service offering.

GET THE DATA

Ask 100 (or more, if you're feeling ambitious and want a more robust sample size. 100 is good for most SMBs) random people in your most important market (however you choose to find them, and however you choose to define "market", but it must be people at least passively familiar with your brand and it must be a random sample) to write down 5 *very brief* statements about your company.

The prompt is simple: "If you were going to describe our company in 10 words or fewer to someone who's never heard of us before, in five brief sentences, what would you say?"

Have them write down the answer to that question on 5 separate lines (so...5 brief descriptions about your company in total) and make sure they don't overthink it. Whatever pops into their head first.

So… for example. “Give me 5 brief sentences, 10 words or fewer, describing Nike to your friend that’s never heard of it”

1. Global shoe brand

2. Famously good advertising featuring famous athletes

3. Iconic logomark, called the “Swoosh”, that looks like a checkmark

4. Sold pretty much everywhere

5. Based in Oregon

Once you've got 100 (or whatever sample size you’re targeting) surveys filled out, pull together all the lines on one giant spreadsheet so you've got 500 rows of randomized anecdotal statements about your company from a random sample of people in the market.

Next, have some other person (*or three other people, if you wanna be more accurate… see below 👇🏼) who didn't make the survey bucket the statements however they see fit in the next column on the spreadsheet. The point here is to get similar anecdotal statements roughly bucketed together and to build a little redundancy in the system so it's not just one person's opinion on how they should be bucketed.

It's hard to measure anecdotal data, so you'll have to use your best judgment. If someone says "Famous brewery in the Chicago area" as a descriptor, you might choose to bucket that as "Chicago-centric brewery", as an example. You don't want too many buckets or the data becomes meaningless, but you also want enough so that the label you choose for the statement is as accurate as possible.

*If you’re having three people do it - Take all three of the bucketed spreadsheets and combine them so you’ve got 1500 rows of anecdotal data with a bucket for each statement. Now bucket the buckets. If one person wrote “Mentions Chicago” as their bucket and another wrote “Chicago location”, then both of those can be bucketed as “chicago-centric brewery”. Do this with every single line. Yes, it will take time, and yes, it will be worth it.

Now count all the buckets (or bucketed buckets), and then rank them according to how many statements fell into that particular bucket, and then apply that number as a percentage of the total responses:

1. Chicago-centric brewery (836 responses) - 826/1500 = 56%

2. Lager brewery (456) - 456/1500 =30%

3. Lizard mascot (134) - 134/1500 =9%

4. Mediocre food (34) - 34/1500 = 2%

5. Etc...

You will inevitably have a long tail of buckets that get less relevant, hence the importance of keeping the number of buckets reasonable.

THE SCORE

Now…here’s the rubric for your newly calculated CAS:

1. <5 buckets = Stellar

2. 5-7 buckets = Very good

3. 8-9 buckets = Standard

4. 10+ buckets = Poor

INSIGHTS

Not only does this give you some interesting insights into what people think about you in general, but it also shows you which messages are landing effectively and which ones aren’t. If a brand priority for the 2023 marketing plan was “Evangelizing our flagship Stout, Caramel Camel”, and only 6% of your customers mention Caramel Camel at all, then you’ve got some work to do get that message out there properly.

The rankings provide an empirical look into what folks think about your brand, and you can make some smart marketing decisions on this data. If the ranking lines up with your brand messaging priorities, then you’re golden. If not, you’ve got some work ahead of you.

The whole point of this is simple: the fewer the buckets, generally speaking, the better. Fewer buckets mean more customers are thinking similarly about your brand, which means you've got stronger alignment, which means that your messaging is dialed in and your customers are singing the same song and swimming in the same direction. Pick your metaphor.

If most of your customers are saying the same things about your brand, that's a great thing. Ideally, it's the messaging you've been promoting and conveying purposefully with your brand communications, but at the very least it means that your brand isn't unfathomable and stands for something specific and meaningful (this is brand positioning).

If they're all saying different things, then you've got a massive problem. Marketing's #1 job is to defend the brand and keep it specific, strong, and purposeful. You cannot be all things to all people, and if you are, then you’re not that important to any one person, and in this highly competitive and financially difficult beer market, that’s a death sentence. It means you’ve lost (or you’re quickly losing) relevance, which causes you to lose engagement, and then lose sales, and then fade away into the universe of products and services withering away on the back shelf. This has happened inexorably to a lot of national brewery flagship beers (Fat Tire, Boston Lager, Bud Light, etc) over the past 10 years as the craft beer market has become hyper-localized and segmented, and there’s almost nothing a company can do about it once you’ve crossed that line.

Like NPS, CAS is a solid marketing metric that should be measured annually to eliminate any assumptions you might be making about what your customers are thinking.