Brand Intelligence for the C suite (What negative associations are costing you)

Authentic brand associations, the spontaneous thoughts consumers generate about a brand, typically captured through open-ended survey responses or unstructured social listening data, are widely recognized as drivers of market outcomes. In a recent HBR paper, CVS Health showed that the number of positive authentic associations was predictive of future customer spending. Here we dive deeper into the financial value at the level of individual associations.

Using a field dataset from over 9,000 customers of CVS Health, linking stated brand associations to future spending behavior and a financial brand value metric. Using a predictive modeling framework, we estimate the marginal impact of individual positive and negative associations on subsequent customer expenditures and financial brand value. For the latter, we use the customer-surplus value approach.

Three takeaways:
1. Adding positive associations is associated with a double-digit increase in future spending, while negative associations correspond to similarly large decreases.
2. The financial impact varies substantially across specific associations (e.g., “friendly and helpful service” vs. “long lines/slow service” or “expensive”), allowing for granular valuation at the attribute level.
3. Reductions in negative associations yield substantially greater improvements in expected brand value than equivalent increases in positive associations, consistent with loss aversion.