Kantar Experience Impact Connects Customer Experience and Brand Growth

On October 6, 2026, Kantar introduced Kantar Experience Impact, a new solution for measuring how customer experience affects brand perceptions and business outcomes. Developed in partnership with Qualtrics, the product combines Kantar’s brand equity research with the capabilities of the Qualtrics Experience Management platform. Companies can identify which customer interactions have the greatest influence on brand perceptions, benchmark their performance against competitors, and prioritize investments.

Connecting Customer Experience and Brand Equity

Companies typically analyze customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and operational metrics separately. This approach helps assess service quality and brand perceptions, but makes it difficult to determine which specific interactions influence a brand’s market position.

Kantar Experience Impact brings these data sources together in a single analytical framework. It draws on Kantar’s Meaningful, Different and Salient (MDS) research methodology, which evaluates how meaningful a brand is to consumers, how distinct it is from competitors, and how readily it comes to mind in purchase decisions. The Qualtrics platform supports the collection and analysis of customer experience data.

Combining the two approaches makes it possible to compare the quality of customer interactions with brand attributes and identify touchpoints associated with stronger or weaker brand perceptions.

Analyzing the Views of Customers and Prospective Buyers

Unlike traditional Customer Experience programs, which primarily study existing customers, Kantar Experience Impact also considers the views of people who do not yet use a company’s products or services.

This allows organizations to compare prospective customers’ expectations with the actual experiences of existing customers. For example, research may show that advertising and brand communications create expectations that a company cannot consistently meet through direct customer interactions.

The solution can also incorporate additional Voice of Customer data, operational metrics, and brand research. This helps teams examine not only the ratings assigned to individual interactions but also why different audience segments perceive the company differently.

Competitive Benchmarking and Prioritizing Improvements

Kantar Experience Impact enables companies to compare customer experience and brand equity measures with competitors. It helps identify which touchpoints have the greatest influence on brand perceptions, where competitors deliver a better experience, and which changes may provide the most value.

The official product description provides for comparisons against up to 12 competitors. The analysis produces a prioritized list of opportunities to improve customer experience.

For marketing and CX teams, this creates a basis for justifying investments at specific stages of the customer journey using data on the relationship between interaction quality and brand strength. However, the solution is designed to assess relevant drivers and support decision-making, not to guarantee the financial return from every proposed change.

Early Findings From a Pilot Project

At the product launch, Kantar described a pilot project involving a European telecommunications provider. The research found that the most pronounced gap in brand perceptions occurred among customers in their first year of service.

This finding identified the initial period of the customer relationship as a priority for improving the experience. Rather than distribute investment equally across all service stages, the organization gained evidence to focus on onboarding new customers.

Kantar also reported that, according to its research, brands offering a substantially differentiated customer experience are 2.5 times more likely to achieve significant market share growth. This is a research finding reported by Kantar, not evidence of the effectiveness of Kantar Experience Impact after implementation.

Availability and Business Applications

Kantar Experience Impact is available through the Qualtrics platform and marketplace. Within Qualtrics, the solution includes guided setup, a ready-made survey, and an analytics dashboard with recommendations. Qualtrics documentation describes it as a solution that uses the Meaningfully Different Experiences methodology to connect customer experience data with business outcomes and market share.

The product is intended for marketing, research, and Customer Experience teams. Kantar specifically highlights retail, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, travel, and hospitality as sectors where customer experience strongly influences brand relationships and growth prospects.

Kantar is a global marketing research and analytics company that studies consumer behavior, evaluates brands and marketing effectiveness, and develops growth strategies. Qualtrics provides an Experience Management platform for collecting and analyzing customer and employee experience data, identifying issues, and managing improvements.