Returning from holiday this week, I’ve read the Bloomberg BusinessWeek article that shows that the least-liked companies in the US had the best stock market returns in 2013. It makes great contrarian reading.
It’s already sparked a great many responses, so I’ll limit my thoughts to a quick reply. The analysis is probably right as far as it goes but is refuted by longer and wider studies so appears to be a 2013 anomaly – ‘a return to junk’ as both ASCI and BusinessWeek elsewhere describe it. It’s also skewed by a number of monopolies and near-monopoly enterprises in the analysis, for which customer loyalty is naturally less critical to returns.
Here are the links to the initial article and a couple of the better responses:
The initial article. After the attention-grabbing headline it really states that ‘customer satisfaction has no relevance to stock price.’ Read some of the comments below the article too.
The reply from the American Customer Satisfaction Index
Bruce Temkin’s thoughts.
Lastly, below is an analysis we did at CEC recently showing the strong correlation of Aussie banks performance to their customer satisfaction scores in 2013…
