Halo Effects and Brands: Being Cautious When Reviewing Customer Feedback
A great score on a feedback attribute can be a great score or it can mean nothing more than that your brand is propping up a poor score. Psychologists have known about the halo effect for a century. Here's how to spot it in your data, with a worked example from a Canstar mobile phone survey.
On this page
Customer feedback surveys are subject to halo effects, so you must be careful when interpreting the results. A good result in a specific attribute does not necessarily mean that you are performing well.
When discussed in marketing textbooks, the halo effect is often treated as an asset: build a strong brand and let it lift everything else. That’s true, but it can also be a problem when you’re reading your own customer feedback.
What Is the Halo Effect?
The halo effect is where one overall impression colours every separate judgement. To put it plainly, it’s where a great brand artificially lifts the perception of a service attribute. Psychologist Edward Thorndike named it in 1920 (A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings).
Thorndike studied ratings of employees, army officers and aviation cadets. Scores for separate traits, such as intelligence, leadership and physique, were correlated too highly and too evenly. He concluded the ratings were affected by:
“a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgments of the qualities by this general feeling.”
Customers do the same with companies. This effect is important to those of us attempting to understand how well we are delivering to customer needs, because a good score in one area, say overall brand image, can artificially lift scores in other areas of service delivery.
Halo Effects Show Up in Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Halo effects distort customer satisfaction measures, not just psychology experiments. Jochen Wirtz and John Bateson tested for halo in satisfaction ratings of service attributes (Wirtz and Bateson, 1995).
They changed the expectations and performance of one service attribute and held every other attribute constant. So any movement in the ratings of the other attributes could only be halo.
They found strong halo effects, which in a real business could have led managers to the wrong conclusions and the wrong actions.
How Brand Halo Lifted Virgin Mobile’s Network Coverage Score
Virgin Mobile out-scored its own network provider on network coverage, which points to brand halo as much as to technical performance.
This was brought home to me very clearly in the results of a mobile phone carrier survey performed by Canstar Blue (Virgin rings true for mobile phone carrier customers). The chart below provides the high-level responses for different areas of carrier performance.
Canstar Blue mobile phone carrier ratings, by area of performance
There are a couple of interesting themes in this chart.
Halo Shows as Near-Identical Scores Across Every Attribute
Notice the relative similarity of responses in all areas for each carrier. For instance, Virgin Mobile has 5 stars across all ratings and Vodafone has 4 stars for all ratings.
This is probably an example of the halo effect: respondents are scoring the organisation in a similar way across all of the different areas of performance.
Virgin Out-Scored Optus on Coverage Using the Optus Network
Compare the network coverage for Virgin Mobile and Optus. While Virgin receives 5 stars, Optus is only rated at 3 stars.
Not that interesting until you realise that Virgin used the same network as Optus. In fact, Virgin Mobile was owned by Optus. Optus phased out the Virgin Mobile brand from 2018.
There may be good reasons for some difference in customer perception of coverage. The carriers may have different customer demographic profiles that lead Optus customers to be living in areas of poor coverage while Virgin customers live in areas of good coverage.
However, with a claimed 96% of the population covered, the difference would seem to be small and not enough to support a 40% difference in perceived coverage.
In reviewing these data, it does seem that Virgin Mobile’s very high Network Coverage score owes as much to halo effects from its strong and positive brand association as it does to technical performance.
Why Halo Effects Hit Subjective Attributes Like Coverage
Network coverage is the kind of attribute where halo is likely to be stronger.
A review of halo research by Neil Beckwith et al. lists ambiguous or subjective attributes, and objects seen as popular, as circumstances likely to produce more haloing (Halo Effects in Marketing Research: Review and Prognosis, Advances in Consumer Research, 1978).
Few customers can measure coverage for themselves. In my view, their impression of the brand filled the gap.
What Brand Halo Means for Your Customer Feedback
On the upside, the Canstar result shows that the right brand values and emotional engagement can lift customer perceptions in all areas of a company’s performance.
On the downside, halo effects can and do alter customer perception of company performance (up and down), so you need to be careful when interpreting customer feedback.
How to Check Customer Feedback for Halo Effects
You can’t remove halo from customer feedback, but you can stop it misleading you. Halo doesn’t make feedback useless either: messy customer feedback is still useful if you read it with care.
Flat Attribute Profiles Signal a Halo Effect
When a customer, or a whole brand, scores almost the same on every attribute, read the scores as one overall impression rather than separate measurements.
That’s the pattern in the Canstar ratings. It’s also the pattern Thorndike described as “too high and too even”.
Check Halo-Prone Scores Against Operational Data
Virgin’s coverage score only looked odd once it was compared with a fact: both carriers ran on the same network.
Compare attribute scores with what you can measure directly, such as delivery times, fault rates or response times. Where the two disagree, suspect halo before you celebrate or start a fix.
Measure Soon After the Experience to Reduce Halo
Timing and scale design change how much halo you get. In a 2001 study, Jochen Wirtz found less halo when satisfaction was measured straight after consumption rather than later, and when respondents used a relative rating scale instead of a standard satisfaction scale (Improving the measurement of customer satisfaction).
That’s one more argument for transactional surveys sent soon after the interaction they ask about.
Comparing Attribute Scores Across Brands Mixes Halo With Performance
A league table like the Canstar ratings compares brands, and each brand’s halo travels into every one of its attribute scores.
In my opinion, that’s one more reason external benchmarks rarely tell you much. Compare your own scores over time, measured the same way.
Next Steps
Want more information on customer feedback surveys?
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Halo Effect in Customer Feedback?
- The halo effect in customer feedback is when a customer's overall impression of a company colours how they rate each separate attribute, such as price, service or coverage. Psychologist Edward Thorndike named the effect in 1920. A 1995 experiment by Jochen Wirtz and John Bateson found strong halo effects in customer satisfaction ratings of service attributes.
How Can You Tell if Halo Is Inflating Your Customer Scores?
- Look for flat profiles, where a customer or brand scores almost the same on every attribute, and for attribute scores that disagree with operational facts. In a Canstar Blue survey, Virgin Mobile scored five stars for network coverage while Optus scored three, even though Virgin ran on the Optus network.
Can You Reduce the Halo Effect in Customer Surveys?
- You can reduce halo but not remove it. A 2001 study by Jochen Wirtz found less halo when satisfaction was measured straight after the experience rather than later, and when customers used a relative rating scale instead of a standard satisfaction scale. Checking scores against operational data catches what survey design misses.
