Tribune. Instead of sticking to the assessment of the gross national product, the aggregate of all the annual productions of a country, more and more economists are now seeking to measure “gross national happiness”. Bhutan has been a pioneer, inscribing in its Constitution the centrality of this quest. The United Nations has established a Global Happiness Index.
Countries like New Zealand have gone a long way in practical terms, linking their economic policies to concrete indicators of well-being. In France, President Sarkozy launched a study commission on this topic in 2009 under the leadership of the Nobel Prize in economics. Joseph stiglitz.
A more emotional world
Developing new measurement tools is a fundamental element in changing situations. The reasoning is valid on a macroscopic scale, for the rulers of countries or cities, but also on a much finer scale, when it comes to probing the hearts and kidneys of consumers to design and sell new products and services.
Traditionally, it is the short-term satisfaction of these consumers that marketers study. But, for the past seven or eight years, a growing community of specialists has come together on an international scale and started to build new measuring instruments to study, beyond this satisfaction, the impact in terms of well-being. products and services offered.
The notion is complex. We are leaving a cognitive universe, with satisfaction linked for example to good value for money, fast and fluid delivery, a quality corresponding to expectations, to enter a more emotional world.
It is a question of evaluating the feeling of security, confidence, caused by the products and services offered, as well as their consequences in terms of mental and physical health. The questions asked to consumers relate to their emotions, ethical and even spiritual aspects.
From a practical point of view, we are moving from immediate measures to surveys carried out later, measuring medium-term perceptions.
Less than 10% of loyal satisfied customers
These revisited marketing studies were first born out of a request from the companies themselves, disappointed with the inability of traditional measurement methods to predict behaviors that are very important to them, such as consumer loyalty or infidelity to brands.
Many consumers still want to assert their status through purchases that position them socially, but, more and more, they are also asking for transparency in order to be able to trust
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