What Factors Affect Marketing Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the degree to which customers are happy with a company, product or organization. Marketing customer satisfaction is the degree to which customers are happy with the way a company or organization has marketed itself, its products or its services. Factors that affect customer satisfaction with a marketing effort include entertainment and informational value, perceived honesty or believability and perceived applicability.

People, including customers, like to be entertained. Commercials, ads and other marketing efforts that catch a customer's attention and are interesting or amusing can increase marketing customer satisfaction levels. Marketing that evokes genuine emotion, be it laughter or sadness, can be very effective in connecting with a customer.

Customers often like marketing campaigns that tell them something useful, either about the company, product or service, or about life in general. This might include interesting facts about the company's history, pricing, promotional opportunities or information on where to buy the product. Providing such information can increase marketing customer satisfaction.

The level of perceived honesty is critical to marketing customer satisfaction. No matter how interesting a marketing campaign may be, customers are likely to be annoyed or even angry if they feel a company is lying to them in order to encourage a sale or feel that the product or service is being intentionally misrepresented. Angry customers are unlikely to buy and may even discourage others from doing so.

Believability is related to honesty, but should be viewed slightly differently when considering marketing customer satisfaction. While all claims and statements made about the product or service must be believable, it is okay for the scenario in which they are presented to suspend belief. For example, everyone knows that animals and inanimate objects cannot speak. Yet many product "spokespeople" are not human. This is fine, and can even add to the entertainment factor of an advertisement, but any product claims made by these characters should still be believable to the customer.

In order to achieve high levels of marketing customer satisfaction, the customer must also perceive that the marketing messages are applicable to them. This means that images and messages must seem appropriate to the customer's lifestyle and must appear to fall in the price range with which the customer would feel comfortable. Likewise, the product or service must appear to solve a problem for the customer or meet a need or desire. The customer also must perceive that the product or service is for someone like him.