What is Indexing ✦

Indexing.

Benchmarking tools have been a valuable source of information for decades, however, many of the approaches haven't been standardised, accurate nor interactive, meaning audiences have struggled to influence the inputs and outputs.

Indexing is crucial for organisations seeking to enhance their competitiveness, efficiency, and effectiveness in their respective industries. Our new approaches go beyond simple benchmarking to provide this guidance.

Why it makes a difference

Seeing the whole picture

Consumers and businesses do not interact with or have perceptions of a brand in isolation. Experience and perception are shaped not only by someone’s background, archetype and need, but also context, and their experience in the world.

Inspiration

Creativity requires inspiration and looking to aspirational brands who lead on experience and brand reputation provides a great starting point for new ideas.

Being customer centric sets you apart.

In an increasingly commoditised and crowded marketplace, ever advancing technology and readily available information continue to shape and influence consumer behaviour. People are increasingly willing and easily able to switch brands, whenever they want.

Switching is more prevalent in certain categories but is becoming more common even in sectors with lower engagement and higher inertia such as financial services. Meaning brands need to work harder to attract and keep customers. So, delivering an outstanding experience is vital and a way to stand out.

Being customer obsessed is rare.

Evidence links great CX to better business results across a diverse range of industries from banking, utilities, and travel through to retail. Customers who have a better experience are more likely to stay with a brand, buy again from the brand and become a brand evangelist.

This directly links to actual business performance and commercial return, brands who deliver great customer experience grow more quickly than their competitors offering a poorer experience. Despite this evidence outstanding customer experience is still rare.

Listening to the customer – an objective view.

To deliver a great service, it’s crucial to listen to the customer needs and expectations. To have an objective view it is important to reach out and understand, in-depth, the customer experience.

This needs to include determining what is important to customers and the wider context of their experience with other brands. The insight can shape refining the experience and ensure the entire organisation puts the customer at the heart of everything they do.

Why our approach works

Our indexes understand competitor landscape across various verticals. Not only benchmarking key metrics, but also to understand the drivers of behaviour and how to move forward. 

Create evidence-based insight

We ensure we are comparing like for like in a robust way that represents the audience. In practice this means asking the right questions in the same order around a relevant and recent experience.

Effectively inform and shape strategy

Our questions go beyond identifying a brands position. It is more important to know the ‘why’ and to be able to predict the impact of the ‘now what’.

Inspire within and beyond category

Brands rightly want to know what they can learn from their peers and leading brands in other sectors. Identifying and shaping ideas that will add value and deliver a return on investment.

Our Indexes

Watermelon run a variety of indexes across different industries and different measures. We currently run 4 indexes measuring the drivers of CX through to the impact of PR. 

  • CX Index

    Helping brands understand and transform CX through prioritising initiatives, inspiring change and creating a loyal customer base.

    Learn more

  • Living Brand Index

    Creating brand ideas that go viral and drive share of voice efficiently given constraints on marketing budgets.

    Learn more

  • ESG Index

    How can brands talk about their ESG credentials most effectively and the impact this has on consumer decisions arounds brands.

    Coming soon!

  • UX Index

    Showing brands how to transform their web and app experience.

    Coming soon!

CX INDEX

The CX index is the first benchmarking programme we created and launched in the UK, Australia and US and it is based around our five customer experience principles.

The customer experience principles are based on insight from listening to over 500,000 customers across a range of brands and interactions.
This insight provides us with a clear and detailed understanding of customer experience across a range of sectors and interactions. This knowledge and focused expertise allowed us to develop a framework to help our clients understand their customer needs and harness this insight to evolve the service offer.

We have taken the insight and run extensive modelling to identify the key elements that make up outstanding experience.

Twice yearly study looking at over 80 brands, speaking to 4,500 people

Identifies what drives great CX and where brands need to focus efforts

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The CX Principles

Our CX index is based around a proven framework of five CX principles that explain what underpins great experience.

  • Personalisation

    Building the service and experience around customer preferences.

  • Ease

    Delivering a frictionless service across the four dimensions of effort: cognitive, physical, time and emotion.

  • Integrity

    Building and demonstrating trust, being reliable, managing expectations and acting in the best interests of the customer.

  • Empathy

    Applying emotional intelligence, seeing and feeling the experience through the eyes of the customer and understanding their hopes, priorities and concerns.

  • Resolution

    Handling questions and issues with ownership, authority, and in a reasonable timeframe. The way an issue is resolved has the power to reverse a poor experience into one that exceeds expectations.

Living Brand Index

Working in partnership with our sister agency Good Relations, a PR and Social agency, we launched the Living Brand Index at the end of 2023. The Living Brand Index is designed to benchmark how well brands share ideas and content to drive a greater share of voice, especially given marketing budget constraints.

There is a lot of great insight, as each wave we speak to over 4,500 consumers about 140 brands. We know which brands are the most trusted, memorable and make the strongest connections. Most importantly we know why people see brands in the way they do and where energy should be focused moving forward.

We have made the insight and data behind it easy to use and share. We have built an intuitive dashboard which will update data stories every six months.

Twice yearly study looking at 140 brands, speaking to 4,500 people.

Identifies the traits that impact how far a brand idea is shared and what good looks like.

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The Living Brand Principles

The traits that best explain what brings a brand idea and character to life fall into three categories.

  • Trusted

    • They are reliable

    • They are respected

    • They are trustworthy

    • They are liked by people I know and trust

    • They fit with my values

  • Memorable

    • They are distinctive and easy to recognise

    • They are innovative and constantly evolving

    • They introduce me to new ideas

    • They constantly exceed my expectations

  • Connected

    • They are always there at the moments and places that matter to me

    • They make a difference to my community/world

    • They are hot in culture right now

    • They are passionate about what is important to me

    • They provide opportunities for me to express myself

Our traits have different levels of influence

The behaviours in these three categories have a different influence what means that a brand idea will be shared. Our index takes this into account, which means it is highly effective in understanding which brands do well across the three behaviours and what this means for PR strategy moving forward.

Subscribing to the Index

What happens next?

  • One of the team will be in touch via email with all of the info you will need.

  • After a chat through, your brand will then be added to the next wave of research (Two waves per year every 6 months).

  • Access to our bespoke dashboard will then be granted for you and any other members of your team you’d like to get setup.

  • Once you’re setup we will arrange a suitable date and time for a CX workshop, to help you use the insight to shape your CX strategy!

The Benefits

  • Your company added to the Index (Free)

  • 2 key Insights (Free)

  • Access to all key Insights (Over 100k Insights!)*

  • Full dashboard access*

  • Customer Immersion Workshop*

  • Customise your Brand Comparisons*

  • Advice on how to implement your strategy

Ready for the next step?

If you’d like to subscribe to our Indexes for free or just want to find out more, please get in touch and one of our lovely team will take care of you!

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