Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If brands—whether they’re brick and mortar merchants or online e-commerce vendors—want to increase customer satisfaction, they ought to offer non-monetary rewards, recent research suggests. But why?

It stands to reason that if two consumers receive rewards with the same dollar value, whether in cash or as a gift, they ought to show the same level of satisfaction. However, studies find this is often not the case, with users that received non monetary rewards experiencing consistently higher satisfaction levels than those who did not.

According to a study conducted by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, this behavior is due in part to what researchers dub “value sensitivity”, or the participant's’ ability to make an educated guess as to the value of their reward: “...present research demonstrates that countability (how easily a product or service can be counted using simple whole numbers) feeds into value sensitivity and thus moderates the impact of inequity on satisfaction” (Northwestern University)....