In a study, Zalando found that for 65% of customers transparency on the topic of sustainability is important when buying fashion, but only 20% of customers inform themselves. 50% of customers state that ethical working conditions are important to them, but only 25% inform themselves about it. Sustainability is gaining importance. But it is not clear what this word even means in the respective industry. So customers easily lose track. The attitude-behaviour gap is not a new phenomenon, but precisely in times with many changes it is important to understand whether customers answer in surveys due to social desirability or whether the answers really reflect the behaviour.
Customer satisfaction used to be an important building block of customer centricity. Although the attitude-behaviour gap existed before too, it did not exist for so many topics and not in so many different industries. Attitudes usually correlated strongly with customers’ behaviour. Companies that understood customers’ attitudes could configure their marketing and sales activities optimally.
The relationship between customers’ attitude and behaviour, however, is breaking up more and more. As set out comprehensively in our Customer Centricity Book, it is important to understand customer value as the central variable of customer centricity. In the sense of customer-value-based decision making, it is important to understand the value of customers and to be able to address the valuable customers in a targeted way. This presents great challenges to companies. But hey — only those who make an effort can be above-average successful. Customer centricity is not low-hanging fruit.
Companies understand digitalisation and customer centricity above all as great front-end tools. Chatbots, social media, etc. But digitalisation and customer centricity aim, as a first step, at customer data, with which as powerful a customer value as possible can be modelled and used in everyday business. Here it is important to identify customers (who really wants to buy sustainable offerings) and to reach customers (individualised email campaigns). The attitude-behaviour gap shows that customer centricity is, on the one hand, challenging to improve, but can also, on the other hand, lead to more growth and profit.
So for customer-centric companies it is important not only to develop sustainable offerings, but to understand as precisely as possible which customers are willing to buy them and, moreover, to possess the ability to address this segment in a targeted way.
The attitude-behaviour gap presents most companies with great challenges. That’s why it is not sufficient for a customer-centric company only to measure satisfaction and improve it.
Here you can find the Zalando article
