CustomerThink: The Boring Truth: Why Financial Stress Is Making Reliability the Ultimate Marketing Feature

Jan 18

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Read the original here.

If your customer stays with you in a downturn, is it because they love your brand? Or is it because they just don’t have the energy to try someone else again?

This is the question every marketing leader needs to ask themselves today. We love to tell ourselves stories about affinity and delight and all the emotional equity we’ve built up with our audience. But with the economy the way it is, I fear a much less sexy dynamic is at work.

There is a wariness in the consumer psyche. Qualtrics’ new research shows that only 52% of consumers feel financially secure, down 3 percentage points from two years ago. In the face of continued inflation and job market anxiety, consumers are transferring those emotions into the brands they interact with.

For the enterprise CMO, this should mean a shift in approach from “delight-based” marketing to “assurance-based” operations. Consumers are feeling financially pinched, and it makes them risk-averse and far less tolerant of friction. They are putting your brand under the lens of anxiety, and that changes the grading rubric.

Reliability Over Innovation

There is one marketing lever for downturns that everyone thinks of first: price. They cut margins and throw discounts at the problem and yell “value” from every digital rooftop. But our data says that is the wrong approach.

In fact, financially insecure consumers are 3.7 points less likely to be motivated to switch to a different brand by a better price point than the global average. This is counter-intuitive, but let’s walk through it with a little empathy. When a customer is stressed, they have zero “risk budget”. They can’t afford to waste time dealing with bad service, a product that doesn’t work, or to re-buy from someone else.

Isabelle Zdatny, the head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute says it well: “When you can’t afford to make a mistake, certainty matters more than savings.” Trust is now the coin of the realm. In fact, your customers’ likelihood to trust you drops by nearly 7 points when they are under budget pressure.

This changes the mandate for marketing leadership. You aren’t selling “better” or “cheaper”; you are selling “safe”. Your strategy, in turn, needs to pivot around four major pillars:

Prioritize Consistency. Novelty is great, but predictability is even better. Make it the responsibility of every single person on your team that your brand can be depended on day in and day out.
Audit your promises. Now is the time to put a spotlight on every brand promise you make. If it is not operationally guaranteed, it is not a promise you make.
Retention Budgeting. Find all of the budgets dedicated to “flashy” acquisition, and instead reallocate them to the retention support structures that will keep your service level from failing.
Redefine “value”. Value is no longer lowest cost; it is lowest risk.

Operationalizing Empathy

If we’ve established that the strategy is reliability, we need to do the tactical heavy lifting to make sure friction is removed from people who are feeling the most heat.

Financial pressure is not distributed equally across demographics, and your tactics should reflect that.

The data tells us that middle-aged consumers (45–59 years old) have experienced the sharpest decline in financial well-being over the last two years at 6.5 points. This is the so-called “sandwich generation,” likely to have a mortgage, aging parents to care for, and college tuition payments. But this financial insecurity is felt more acutely by women as well, with only 49% of women reporting they feel financially secure, as compared to 56% of men.

Let’s personify this as one hypothetical customer I will call “Gary”. Gary is a 50-year-old father of two. Gary isn’t looking for a brand to “wow” him. Gary is looking for a brand that won’t be one more item on his to-do list. If your website is clunky or your customer service line has a 20 minute hold time, Gary isn’t just annoyed; he is gone.

If your brand wants to capture and keep “Garys” of the world, there are four tactical fronts your team should be executing on:

Friction Audits. Get a team with a checklist and laser focus on finding every last broken link, confusing price tier, or “contact us” loop, and kill it. Insecure customers punish friction because they cannot afford the wasted time.
Targeted Messaging. Shift your messaging for the 45-59 cohort away from aspirational imagery and toward things like stability, guarantees, and proven results.
Transparent Pricing. Rip out the variable pricing or hidden fees that may have crept into your go-to-market. They are anxiety triggers for financially insecure customers that simply need to know what the damage will be before they engage.
Support Accessibility. It’s not enough to say your “help” channels are there; your customers need to find them and actually get help. Problem resolution on first contact matters to this demographic far more than high-fidelity personalization or premium features.

The Metrics of Anxiety

If you are still taking your average NPS or CSAT score as a measure of health, you are likely looking at the data and missing the bleeding. In the aggregate, those scores can hide the dissatisfaction of specific cohorts if the overall averages remain the same.

The data is clear, there is a satisfaction gap. 79% for the global average and 74% for those feeling financially insecure. The likelihood to recommend also drops from 72% to 65% for the stressed cohort. You think you are doing fine. You are slowly churning your most vulnerable customers.

Your dashboard needs an update if you want to see the real read on your brand health:

Economic Segmentation. Overlay public economic indicators on your customer base to see if the customers that are changing behavior are the ones with economic stress.
Effort Scores (CES). Your customer effort scores should be king for service interactions. Did you make it hard? Then you lost them.
Churn by Cohort. Track retention specifically in the 45-59 demo and see if you can directly link financial pressure to churn.
Sentiment Velocity. Watch sentiment shift after a service failure. Risk-averse customers are likely to sour faster than those with financial security.

Not a Temporary State

The economic “vibes” are turning into operational realities. Financial security is trending in the wrong direction, so it is not a seasonal shift. It is a behavioral baseline for the next several years.

CMOs need to plan now for a year in which “Safety” is the #1 purchase driver. And it is win or go home. The brands that win in this environment will be the ones that customers look to as a safe harbor in the storm. As you think through your strategy for the next several quarters, keep four developments on your radar:

Self-Service. This will continue to be a way for CMOs to reduce costs, but not if it doesn’t work. In fact, a broken chatbot is worse than no chatbot at all.
Trading Down. Customers will trade down. Get out in front of it by introducing “basic” tiers that maintain reliability guarantees so you don’t lose them entirely.
Frontline Training. Empathy and rapid resolution need to be part of your training curriculum for all frontline staff. Recognize that the customer on the phone is likely already on edge.
Product Simplicity. Align product design to affordability and simplicity rather than feature bloat. Function over frills will be the winning design philosophy.

The Return of the Boring Brand

CMOs, we are in a crisis of confidence in which half of our customers are navigating the market with a tight chest and a lighter wallet. They are not looking for us to dazzle them. They are not looking for a viral TikTok campaign. They are just looking for us to keep our promises.

Back to that question I asked at the start: Is your customer loyal or are they just tired?

If you have built your brand to be the path of least resistance, the sure thing in an unsure world, the answer doesn’t matter. You will keep them either way. In a market defined by stress, the most exciting thing a brand can be is boringly, consistently reliable.