One Marketing Metric To Rule Them All? An Examination of the Emergence and Rise of Net Promoter Score as a Marketing Fashion

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is heralded by proponents as the quintessential marketing metric for measuring customer and brand loyalty. Its popularity is currently very high, especially in North-American companies. The frenetic interest in NPS has led some commentators to call it a cult-like following and religion. From an outsider’s perspective, it is interesting to scrutinize and reflect on why the NPS has gained such a strong position in the marketing practitioner community. Therefore, in the current paper, the emergence and rise of NPS is examined using management fashion theory as an interpretive lens and organizing framework. The findings indicate that the NPS concept exhibits several of the key characteristics and hallmarks of management fashions. In particular, the popularization of the NPS concept has been spearheaded by consulting and marketing research firms selling software solutions. However, as the concept has grown in popularity, it has attracted more scrutiny from skeptical academics, and particularly during the last few years, there have been numerous critical pieces in high-profile business media outlets. Therefore, it can be argued that the NPS concept, at least to some extent, has fallen victim to its own success. The paper discusses these findings about NPS’s evolutionary trajectory and lifecycle in light of theories about management fads and fashions