In Search of Customer Delight: Integrating Customer Satisfaction and NPS Metrics

Abstract

Successful companies know that they must delight their customers to ensure their loyalty and grow their businesses. Building on a dual perspective of academic and industry findings, this paper clarifies the customer delight construct. According to the marketing literature, customer delight (CD) may be viewed as: (1) a distinct emotional state where customer expectations are exceeded, or (2) an extreme form of customer satisfaction (CS). These two positions are assessed with particular attention paid to measurement approaches and challenges. CS and Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics are often used to capture and explicate the meaning of customer delight. Given the strategic importance of these well-established measurement tools, CS and NPS are reviewed and critiqued. The need for a marketing metrics mindset is also discussed. The paper concludes with a 9-point plan for marketing management to successfully implement and evaluate customer delight in organisations.

Full text

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© Henry Stewart Publications 2054-7544 (2023) Vol. 9, 4 1–10 Applied Marketing Analytics
In search of customer delight:
Integrating customer satisfaction
and NPS metrics
Received (in revised form): 17th November, 2023
Art Weinstein
Professor of Marketing at Nova Southeastern University, USA
Art Weinstein, PhD is a professor of marketing at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. He was the
founding editor of the Journal of Segmentation in Marketing and has published more than 90 scholarly
articles/papers and eight books on customer-focused marketing strategy. His latest book is ‘Superior
Customer Value — Finding and Keeping Customers in the Now Economy, 4th Edition’. As a leading
scholar on customer value and business to business segmentation, he has had multiple articles
published in Harvard Business Publishing Education, Journal of Business Strategy, Journal of Creating
Value, Journal of Marketing Analytics, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Strategic
Marketing, Journal of Nonprot and Voluntary Sector Marketing and Marketing Intelligence & Planning.
DrWeinstein has consulted for many leading technology and service companies.
Project Leader, Center for Case Study Excellence (CCSE), Huizenga College of Business & Entrepreneurship,
Nova Southeastern University, 3300 S. University Drive, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33328-2004, USA
Tel: +1 954 262 5097, Mob: +1 954 309 0901; E-mail: art@nova. edu
Abstract Successful companies know that they must delight their customers to ensure
their loyalty and grow their businesses. Building on a dual perspective of academic and
industry ndings, this paper claries the customer delight construct. According to the
marketing literature, customer delight (CD) may be viewed as: (1) a distinct emotional
state where customer expectations are exceeded, or (2) an extreme form of customer
satisfaction (CS). These two positions are assessed with particular attention paid to
measurement approaches and challenges. CS and Net Promoter Score (NPS) metrics are
often used to capture and explicate the meaning of customer delight. Given the strategic
importance of these well-established measurement tools, CS and NPS are reviewed
and critiqued. The need for a marketing metrics mindset is also discussed. The paper
concludes with a 9-point plan for marketing management to successfully implement and
evaluate customer delight in organisations.
KEYWORDS: customer centricity, customer delight, customer obsession, customer
satisfaction, marketing metrics, Net Promoter Score, service experience
INTRODUCTION
Value-creating companies have led a shift in
global marketing thinking from customer
centricity to customer obsession. Forester
notes that customer-obsessed organisations
such as Coca-Cola, HSN and the LEGO
Group follow four guiding principles: they
are customer-led, insights-driven, fast and
connected. They dene a customer-obsessed
enterprise as ‘one that focuses its strategy,
operations, and budget to enhance its
knowledge of and engagement with
customers’.1 Forester’s research found that
only 13 per cent of companies are customer-
obsessed but notes that these rms have
happier employees, stronger customer
relationships and higher revenues than their
direct competitors.2
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Customer obsession calls for a change in
how business performance is evaluated. Philip
Kotler said it best: ‘It is no longer enough to
satisfy your customers. You must delight
them’.3 Marketers must create business
experiences that exceed buyer expectations.
Innovative companies such as Apple and
Amazon strive to amaze, astound or wow their
customers. Customer delight has been a
neglected area of research in marketing, and
thus, it is the focus of this paper.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION VERSUS
CUSTOMER DELIGHT
Many marketers believe that customer
satisfaction (CS) is the most important
metric. HappyOrNot, a Finnish company, is
an innovator in satisfaction research. They
found that if product/service assessment is
easy, consumers will provide feedback
without the need for incentives. Their core
research terminal has four large buttons —
dark green/smiley (very happy), light
green/less smiley (happy), light red/frowny
(unhappy) and dark red (very unhappy)
— accompanied with a sign asking
customers to rate their experience by
pushing one of the buttons. The
HappyOrNot devices track responses to
provide real-time feedback to organisations.4
A large study (70,000 customers, 1,068
managers and 97 countries) revealed that
managerial views of CS is not aligned with
customer perceptions. Managers grossly
overstated CS levels and under-estimated the
impact of customer complaints on future
loyalty.5 The University of Michigan’s
American Customer Satisfaction Index
(ACSI) has found a strong correlation
between CS and nancial performance. CS
analysis can predict and improve nancial
outcomes such as sales growth, gross margin,
operating cash ow, market share and
shareholder return.6 A comparison of two
leading CS indices (ACSI and the UK
Customer Satisfaction Index) is shown in
Table 1.7
In contrast to the CS literature, there is
limited and inconsistent research on the
meaning and measurement of customer
delight (CD). Most of the studies do not
distinguish between delight and satisfaction.8
A notable exception is a solid review paper
Table 1: Customer satisfaction indices: a comparison
Key descriptors
American Customer Satisfaction
Index (ACSI)
UK Customer Satisfaction Index
(UKCSI)
Overall customer satisfaction
score (scale 0–100)
76.5 77.7
Number of business sectors/
industries/companies
10/46/300+13/not identied/not specied
Sample size 180,000 45,000
Year established 1993 2008
Variables impacting customer
satisfaction
Perceived quality, customer
expectations, perceived value,
customer complaints, customer loyalty
Experience, complaints, emotional
connection, customer ethos,
ethics
Customer satisfaction leader Chick-l-A 86.0 Amazon 86.7
Top sector Manufacturing/durable goods 81.7 Retail non-food 82.1
Bottom sector Public administration/government 68.4 Transport 72.5
Sponsor(s) ACSI and the University of Michigan’s
Ross School of Business
The Institute of Customer Service
Source: Adapted from Mittal and Frennea, ‘State of Marketing’ (2018)
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Integrating customer satisfaction and NPS metrics
by Berman.9 Table 2 summarises ve key
dierences between CS and CD based on
his research.
As a customer-centric marketing
construct, there are two schools of thought
on CD which are summarised below and
discussed in the following two sections of
this paper. Customer delight is:
1. an emotional state which is distinct from
CS where user expectations are exceeded
(eg feel delighted, highly pleased with the
buying experience);
2. an extreme form of CS often
operationalised as highly/extremely
satised.
Position 1: Customer delight is a distinct,
emotional state
While the debate is far from settled, Barnes
and Krallman state that customer delight as a
unique marketing construct has recently
gained traction.10 Superior customer value
means continually creating business
experiences that exceed customer
expectations. Chewy, an e-commerce
company that sells pet food and supplies, is
not content with CS. In just over a decade,
Chewy became a Fortune 500 company
with over US$10bn in annual sales and more
than 20,000 employees. Their business
model is built around customer delight —
top-quality products, solid value and stellar
customer service. Service consultants are
available 24/7 to help pet parents with
theirconcerns and select the right products
or services for their pets. Chewy has a
100per cent unconditional satisfaction
guaranteed policy for every order and allows
365 days for returns.11
While the pursuit of exceeding customer
expectations is desirable, reality often dictates
that customers are most satised when rms
avoid disappointing them, rather than trying
too hard to delight them. Therefore,
organisations must focus on the business
fundamentals and have a awless execution
of operational basics. In rare instances of
service failure, service recovery must be a
priority. Customer delight may be unrealistic
for companies such as Amazon or Walmart
where loyalty is driven by seamless and
hassle-free encounters. Brand experiences
can be frictionless (hassle-free) or memorable
(consumers are immersed in the experience).
These experiences directly impact
consumers’ sentiments and spending
behaviour. Williams, et al.’s Consumer
Experience Matrix oers insights for
convenience, boutique, mass-market and
gravity (aspirational) brands. The
implementation of the four competitive
strategies relate to providing delightful
experiences for customers.12
In most cases, customers cannot articulate
how to improve service experiences, or what
they are seeking, to be delighted. Buyers can,
Table 2: Differences between customer satisfaction versus customer delight
Key dimensions Customer satisfaction Customer delight
Typical measurement scale Highly dissatised to highly satised Terrible to delighted
Response hierarchy stage Cognitive (perceptions) Affective (emotions – eg arousal,
joy, pleasure)
Product/service experience Satisfactory but not overly memorable
experiences
Memorable experiences
Customer evaluation Meets/exceeds expectations
(happiness)
Beyond expectations — extraordinary
performance (unexpected positive
surprise)
Delivered value Good/high value Superior value
Source: Adapted from Berman (2005)
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however, readily identify attributes that are
hygiene factors (must-haves) as well as those
that are satisers (nice-to-have). For example,
a mid-priced hotel catering to business
travellers should provide express check-out,
tness room, high-speed Internet
connections, a restaurant and a lounge.
According to Naumann, hygiene factors need
to be delivered at an acceptable level before
satisers become important.13
Firms that oer satisers need to consider
the value-added services that will delight and
surprise the customer. Service quality is
more than meeting specications — the
customer’s point of view is what matters
(ieis the customer delighted?). Consider the
following examples. Before a guest ever sets
foot in Le Parker Meridian Hotel in New
York they can use the hotel’s QuickTime
Virtual Reality, enabling potential guests to
‘walk’ through the lobby and rooms. The
hotel also welcomes repeat guests with
amenity baskets accompanied by
handwritten notes. Zappos, a billion-dollar
shoe, handbag and clothing company owned
by Amazon, delivers ‘Happiness in a Box’.
Their three-part formula is: (1) meet
expectations by delivering the right items,
(2)meet desires through free shipping and
returns including a 365-day return policy
and (3) delight customers via surprise upgrades
to overnight shipping.14 Conversely, bad-
mouthing by dissatised customers can be
not only harmful, but the very death knell to
a company. Case in point: one unhappy
buyer at a computer superstore determined
that this company lost US$50,000 of his
business (direct lifetime value) and another
US$350,000 (indirect lifetime value) due to
negative word-of-mouth comments to his
family and friends!15 Today, it is very likely
that dissatised consumers will post a bad
review on Facebook. Google or Yelp. As
Bud Light has recently learned, negative
comments via social media (word-of-mouse)
can easily go viral, leading to consumer
boycotts, a signicant loss of business and
the need for substantial damage control.
Position 2: Customer delight is highly satised
CS is frequently measured on a 5-point
Likert scale. While there are many variants
of the approach, it is typically rated as
follows: (1) highly dissatised, (2) dissatised,
(3) neither satised or dissatised,
(4)satised and (5) highly satised. The
‘5’option may be viewed as a proxy for
customer delight. In such cases, customers
tend to be highly loyal and not prone to
defection. The ‘4’ score implies satisfaction
but, since it is not strong, customers may not
be loyal and defect. CS measures of 1–3
imply major to minor levels of
dissatisfaction. In such cases, customers are
likely to seek alternative vendors. Lexus lives
by its value proposition, ‘The Relentless
Pursuit of Perfection’. The company has
thrived by understanding customer needs
and creating exceptional automobiles. This
has led to the industry’s highest CS rate. The
CS metric is so important that Lexus uses
this basic scale in assessing service quality for
their vehicles. In a recent service encounter
survey, customers were advised to call their
satisfaction specialist directly if they were
unable to give them a ‘5’ (excellent) based
on a standard 5-point Likert scale.
Furthermore, the pursuit of customer delight
is subsumed into their business philosophy,
dealership atmospherics and service
experience. Not surprising, in the service
pick-up area, this same dealership had a
large, framed photo featuring the Japanese
word ‘Omotenashi’ with the following
description: ‘v. anticipating and addressing
needs before they arise with unsurpassed
commitment and attention to our guests’
needs, a seless desire to ensure they enjoy
an experience like no other’. At the bottom
of the image, it simply stated — Lexus:
Experience Amazing. The traditional
5-point CS measure may be perceived as
analogous to the 11-point Net Promoter
Score (NPS) scale. It can be inferred that
respondents who are delighted (5) rate the
organisation as a 9 or a 10 — they are highly
satised (promoters); those who are satised
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(4) rate the organisation as a 7 or 8 (passives);
and those who are dissatised (1–3) rate the
organisation as 0–6 are detractors. This idea
should be tested further. Fresh Market, a
North Carolina-based, boutique specialty
grocery chain with 161 stores in 22 states,
exemplies a strong commitment to
customer delight via healthy food oerings,
sensory experiences, personalised services and
a strong customer loyalty programme. Their
marketing strategy of impeccable guest
experience has been recognised. Fresh
Market was honoured as a two-time recipient
of USA Today’s Reader Choice Awards as
‘The Best Supermarket in America’.16 They
clearly communicate their customer-centric
philosophy, as evidenced by placing the
following in-store message at front-end cash
registers, promoting its CS survey:
Note to our survey participants: HIGHLY
SATISFIED = PASS; SATISFIED = FAIL
If your experience with us today is anything
other than HIGHLY SATISFYING, please
let us know. We’ll work hard to make sure your
expectations are met — EVERY TIME! Ask
any Guest Service Manager to assist with ANY
concern you might have experienced, and we’ll
be happy to assist.
MARKETING PERFORMANCE:
AMETRICS MINDSET
Top executives, board members and
shareholders demand accountability for new
and established marketing programmes.
Understanding customer behaviour and
buying patterns is essential. CS, loyalty and
retention metrics are an important part of
the strategic marketing process to learn how
successful the organisation is now and what
it needs to accomplish in order to become
even more successful in the years ahead. As
companies transition from a customer
satisfaction to a customer delight mandate,
marketers will debate what supporting
metrics to establish and evaluate. Choices
range from single-item scores such as NPS
or the North Star Metric (NSM) to dozens
of marketing and performance measures.17
Aleading book identies 50 marketing
metrics that matter relating to the 4Ps
(product, price, place, promotion), margins,
protability, market share, the web and key
performance indicators.18
Organisations clearly benet from a
focused metrics process. Marketers can select
a limited number of strong measures that
make the most sense for an organisation
within the context of a marketing metrics
framework, such as the 5C approach: collect
Voice-of-Customer Data, customer lifetime
value, customer retention, customer
revenue, and communicate marketing
results.19 In line with this streamlined
thinking, metrics can be summarised into six
major categories: nancial, competitive,
consumer behaviour, consumer
intermediate, channel and innovativeness.20
Another perspective calls for three key
measures of business performance: return on
investment (ROI), protability and lifetime
value.21 Marketing metrics are also industry-
specic. In the case of retailers, seven
categories of metrics are most important:
brand equity, customer lifetime value
(CLV), word-of-mouth referral value,
customer acquisition and retention, cross-
buying and up-buying, multi-channel
shopping and product return.22
Single item measures have been criticised
by methodologists but are appropriate and
valid in many situations.23 This is particularly
true when constructs are unambiguous,
when a holistic impression is desired, and for
convenience. Single-item measures have
been used to eectively assess issues relating
to change readiness, health status, job
satisfaction, quality of life, self-esteem and
dozens of other categories.24 In an analysis
(n = 168) of three service sectors, banking,
mobile phones and hair salons, NPS was
found to be an eective alternative to
traditional word-of-mouth measures.
Furthermore, NPS related to the construct
of CS as an antecedent and repurchase
intention as a correlate.25
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Solo measures may require the collection
of multiple inputs to obtain the necessary
data for the analysis. For example, in
measuring CLV, data needs will include the
average amount spent per purchase, number
of purchases made per year, average gross
prot per customer, customer acquisition
costs, marketing expenditures to acquire a
customer, discount rates and customer
retention rates. Recency, frequency and
monetary (RFM) analysis is a helpful tool in
evaluating customer usage and loyalty
patterns. Recency refers to the last service
encounter/transaction; frequency assesses
how often these customer-company
experiences occur; and monetary value
probes the amount that is spent, invested or
committed by customers for the rm’s
products and services. Following the lead of
direct marketers who are major users of this
approach, online retailers have applied RFM
analysis with surprising results. For example,
for apparel e-tailers, new customers cost
20per cent to 40 per cent more to acquire
when compared to their brick-and-mortar
counterparts. However, online repeat
customers spend more than twice as much in
months 24–30 of their relationships as they
do in the rst six months.26
CAPTURING CUSTOMER DELIGHT
VIA NPS
In response to the business metrics challenge
and search for a sound proxy for customer
delight, corporate marketers and managers
worldwide have embraced NPS. While NPS
is often criticised because it is a single-item
measure, its overall impact cannot be denied.
It is a robust and powerful metric that has
been proven to be insightful and actionable.
The widespread adoption of this strategic
customer-centric tool is the best testimony
to its success.
Frederick Reichheld’s seminal Harvard
Business Review article ‘The One Number
You Need to Grow’ noted that companies
waste much time and resources attempting
to measure CS via complex surveys which
suer from poor response rates and
ambiguous meaning. Building on pioneering
work at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the author
found that a single ‘would recommend’
question is a useful predictor of growth,
focuses employees on the right corporate
priorities and captures true loyalty rates,
which clearly aects protability.27 The end
product of Reichheld’s pioneering work
emerged as NPS. Twenty years later, this
pragmatic instrument has become a vital part
of the marketing manager’s toolbox to assess
short and long-term business performance.
Organisations are rated based on the
customer experience and respondents are
categorised into one of three groups:
promoters, passives or detractors. A single-
item, 11-point satisfaction scale — NPS
— is used by Enterprise Rent-a-Car,
JetBlue, Intuit (manufacturer of TurboTax
software) and thousands of leading global
companies. It is an easy-to-use, highly
informative measure to monitor business
performance over time. Due to its simplicity
and explanatory power, NPS has been
widely praised by marketing practitioners as
the best metric for assessing customer loyalty
and a company’s ability to grow. This paper
revisits the perceived real-world value of
NPS in the context of a sound marketing
metrics process. The established CS metric
and emerging customer delight constructs
are also carefully evaluated as marketing
performance measures.
The NPS measure has captured the
imagination of customer value analysts.
According to Bain & Company, long-term
value creators have an NPS twice the
average company and leaders grow at twice
the rate of competitors.28 While the real-
world advantages of NPS analysis are readily
apparent, researchers are concerned that this
single-item metric is subject to measurement
bias, lacks validity and may be inferior to
other CS and loyalty measures and indices.29
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NPS: Marketing applications
Below is the simple three-step process for
calculating NPS.
1. Following the service experience, ask
each customer one simple question. Based
on your last experience with Company X,
how likely would you be to recommend
Company X to a friend or colleague?
Customers respond on a 0–10-point
rating scale where 0 is not at all likely and
10 is extremely likely.
2. Respondents are classied as promoters
(9–10), passives (7–8) or detractors (0–6).
3. The percentage of customers who
are detractors is subtracted from the
percentage of those who are promoters
(passives are not considered in the
analysis) to provide NPS.
Consider these recent NPS from ve
leading US airlines: Southwest Airlines (71),
Jet Blue (67), United Airlines (50), Delta
(41) and American Airlines (3). These ratings
are then compared among key rivals as well
as the industry average (28) to infer
meaning.30 Industries are dynamic and
subject to rapid change as evidenced by
United’s ascension and American’s decline.
Mike Gowen, co-founder of Delighted,
explains that NPSs assess ve ranges of
customer experience: a negative number is
poor performance, zero to less than 30
means lots of opportunities for
improvement, 31–49 means quality
experiences are delivered, 50–69 means
excellent customer experiences, and 70+
equate to world class customer experiences.
For example, the software industry has an
average NPS of 41 with a low score of 28;
TurboTax has a high score of 55.31
According to Geeks News Desk, some
NPS leaders by industry sector include
USSA (auto insurance and banking),
American Express (credit cards), Publix
(grocery stores) and Ritz-Carlton (hotels).32
NPSs should be evaluated absolutely and
relatively (ie versus rivals). A 12-industry,
two-year analysis of the Survicate client base
found that four sectors had NPSs of 40–69
(good/very good), seven sectors were 20–39
(competitive) and one sector had a negative
number which was substandard (needs
considerable improvement). None were
found to be over 70 which is world class.
Tables 3 and 4 summarise Survicate’s NPS
ndings by industry sector.33,34
CUSTOMER DELIGHT AND NPS:
RESEARCH EXTENSIONS
The customer delight construct is evolving
and can benet from analytical insights
gained through the value of NPS initiatives,
to date. Given its strategic signicance and
simplicity, NPS has been widely praised and
regularly used by marketing practitioners.
While methodologists and scholars have
been more critical of this single-item score,
this paper provides additional evidence that
NPS is quite useful in evaluating customer
delight. Clearly, these marketing metrics
Table 3: Net promoter score ratings
NPS evaluation NPS Industry sectors
World class 70+None
Very good 40–69 Education, healthcare, professional services, retail
Competitive 20–39 E-commerce, entertainment, nance, food, information technology,
marketing, software
Sub-standard 19 or less Construction/engineering
Source: Adapted from Survicate’s NPS Benchmarks for 2021
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merit additional research in business. The
main issue is not the usefulness of NPS, but
rather what renements can enhance the
eectiveness of this instrument as a practical
and value-creating tool for measuring
customer delight.
The psychometric properties of the scale
should be reevaluated. NPS research has
been found to fare well on test-retest
reliability; a recent study reported an r = .75
for likelihood to recommend, which
exceeded CS with the brand, r = .70, and
attitude towards the brand, r = .69.35 Further
work is needed for other forms of reliability
and validity. The customer may be extended
to stakeholders such as employees, suppliers
and aliates. NPS research can also be
employed in non-traditional sectors such as
education. Some universities are now using
NPSs as a recruitment vehicle or in lieu of
end-of-term teaching evaluations.36
Recent work by Reichheld, Darnell and
Burns introduced earned growth rate as a
complementary metric to NPS.37 This
data-derived, add-on emphasises corporate
growth generated by repeat customers and
their referrals. This new metric draws on
accounting results rather than surveys. While
theoretically interesting, the earned growth
rate lacks the simplicity/comparability of
NPS as well as credibility from use by a
multitude of leading global companies. It is
unclear, at this time, if NPS+ approach will
assist in truly evaluating customer delight.
CONCLUSION
Measuring customer delight: Questions
formarketing analysts
The customer delight construct has garnered
interest by leading companies worldwide.
Marketers prioritising this key performance
metric must develop a customer-obsessed
business culture and enhance measurement
tools currently used to evaluate customer
engagement, loyalty, repurchase rates,
purchase intent, recommendations and
growth. The following set of queries oers a
springboard for implementing and enhancing
the customer delight metric.
1. Which view of customer delight
(‘emotional state where user expectations
are exceeded’ or ‘extreme form of
customer satisfaction’) should be the
emphasis for the organisation?
Table 4: NPS by industry sectors
Industry Average NPS score 25/75 percentile
Retail 50 36/66
Education 42 32/66
Consumer goods 39 14/65
Information technology 39 24/64
Finance 33 15/46
Marketing and advertising 33 15/57
Entertainment 27 5/50
Professional services 27 6/54
Software 27 9/50
Health and wellness 26 3/55
Industrial production 10 −20/40
Overall 32 −13/56
Source: Adapted from Survicate’s NPS Benchmarks for 2022
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Integrating customer satisfaction and NPS metrics
2. How will customer delight be
communicated to the customer base?
Consider interactions by service providers,
in-store signage, website/digital marketing
initiatives, and research instruments to
capture customer feedback.
3. How can CS and NPS methodology be
adapted to capture customer delight?
While the standard 5-point Likert CS
scale and 11-point (0–10) NPS scale have
been proven to work eectively, a simpler
3-point (dissatisfaction, satisfaction,
delight) scale can be insightful and is easy
to use by small and mid-sized companies.
4. Can the measurement of customer
delight be enhanced through CS indices,
syndicated research studies and gap analysis?
5. How will social media marketing analytics
be used to evaluate customer delight?
Positive versus negative reviews and ve-
star ratings need to be analysed to achieve
acceptable/desirable outcomes.
6. Is the customer delight philosophy tied to
a long-term value creation strategy?
7. In addition to end users, is relationship
delight measured for other stakeholders
such as employees, suppliers and business
aliates?
8. Is customer delight incorporated as part
of executive and managerial dashboards?
Employees in many industries are stressed
from increased pressure to achieve
excellence from a single overriding
metric such as NPS or CS scores. A
balanced, multiple-view perspective
of several performance indicators can
improve the overall assessment of desired
business outcomes.
9. Is data obtained about the proportion
of customers that are delighted? Is this
information tracked on a monthly or
quarterly basis to maintain/enhance
marketing performance?
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