AT&T’s CMO tied ‘brand love’ to the numbers CEOs care about. Customers are 3 times less likely to leave and much cheaper to acquire
AT&T’s CMO says customers who love the brand are three times less likely to leave, 50% more likely to buy a second product, and cheaper to acquire.
When Kellyn Smith Kenny became AT&T's Chief Marketing Officer in 2020, she took over a company poised for a significant transformation. AT&T had recently expanded into entertainment and completed the $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, but was now shifting back to its core telecommunications business. Kenny saw an opportunity to refocus the company's brand and drive growth.
One of Kenny's early priorities was to quantify the impact of brand strength on customer behavior. She introduced a metric called "brand love," which measures how consumers rate a brand from hate to love on a seven-point scale. AT&T's brand love score has increased by 13 points over the past five years, with a 1- or 2-point annual increase generally considered strong performance.
Kenny found that customers who love AT&T were 1.6 times more likely to become customers within the next year, and existing customers who loved the brand were three times less likely to churn. Moreover, they were 50% more likely to purchase an additional service. In markets with higher brand love, prospect conversion costs were 50% lower.
Kenny's role as Chief Growth Officer also connected marketing to AT&T's product and growth strategy. Her team's insights informed customer research, which in turn shaped product roadmaps, including the Build a Plan offering. This plan targets price-sensitive consumers by offering a lower-priced starting point that allows them to add only the services they want.
Additionally, Kenny's customer research influenced AT&T's response to service failures. The company now offers a guarantee that provides full day service credits for eligible fiber customers experiencing at least 20 minutes of outage and promises 24-hour resolution of technical issues. This guarantee, coupled with Kenny's data showing higher satisfaction among affected customers, has given AT&T a competitive edge in the telecommunications market.
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