Forrester's Brand Experience Index Reveals A Stark Perception Gap Between Customers And NonCustomers Across Industries And Regions

Business Wire

9 hours ago

NASHVILLE, Tenn. & CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to Forrester's (Nasdaq: FORR) Brand Experience Index (BX Index™), both customers and noncustomers are more likely to purchase from, recommend, prefer, and pay a premium for brands with strong brand experience (BX) scores. Across all industries and countries, the average customer BX Index score consistently surpasses the noncustomer score, with differences ranging from 5 to 30 points. For example, in the US, Tesla earns a relatively high customer score, yet its noncustomer score ranks the lowest across all brands and categories, underscoring the significance of improving both brand and customer experience (CX).
Introduced earlier this year to enable brands to assess how likely consumers are to engage with them, Forrester's BX Index evaluates three key factors:
Salience: How top of mind is the brand, and does the customer view it favorably?
Fit: How well does the brand meet the needs of the customer and fit who they are?
Trust: Does the customer feel confident that the relationship will spark a specific positive outcome?
Key findings from the global BX Index rankings include:
Twenty-two brands comprise the 'elite' global tier. In 2025, a total of 22 brands earned the 'elite' spot, the top 5% of all brands that scored the highest. These include Chewy.com in the US, auto and home insurer NRMA Insurance in Australia, and investment firm TD Wealth in Canada.
Americans love their brands more than the Canadians. Despite being close neighbors, the two countries have markedly different brand perceptions. While only a handful of brands in the US secure a 'good' BX Index customer score, there are no brands in Canada that achieve this.
European noncustomers are hard to please. For the 94 brands evaluated in Europe across eight countries, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the highest average customer BX Index score is for auto and home insurers in Germany while the lowest is for home and auto insurers in Italy. The highest industry noncustomer BX Index score is for UK investment firms and the lowest is for banks in France.
India and Singapore have the narrowest customer and noncustomer differential. The Asia Pacific analysis spans Australia, India, and Singapore. In that region, Singapore has two of the lowest customer-to-noncustomer differentials. In contrast, Australia's differential is roughly double that of its two peers, India and Singapore.
'The new BX Index has been designed to offer brands a data-driven approach to win and serve customers,' said Dipanjan Chatterjee, Forrester VP and principal analyst. 'To fully understand a brand's perception, we calculated separate scores for both customers and noncustomers, which were then combined into a composite score to help companies recognize the duality between BX and CX. When companies align their brand promise with the experiences they deliver across both customer and noncustomer segments, there is a compound, multiplier effect.'
In its inaugural year, Forrester evaluated 452 brands across 12 industries and 13 countries to quantify the strength of brands' perception. Additionally, at its CX Summit North America, Forrester will unveil a new unified metric, the Total Experience Score, which combines the BX Index and Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) to assess a brand's ability to deliver on a promise it makes.
Forrester's BX Index rankings and results reports are accessible within the Forrester Decisions portfolio of research services. Clients of Forrester Decisions services for Customer Experience, B2C Marketing Executives, and Digital Business & Strategy have access to the BX Index annual benchmarking exercise to measure the interconnectedness between brand and customer experience.
Read the report — Forrester's Global Brand Experience Index (BX Index™) Rankings, 2025 — to check out how more than 450 brands across 13 countries spanning Asia, Europe, and North America stack against each other (client access required).
Discover more about the Brand Experience Index and how it can offer brands a data-driven approach to win and serve customers.
Learn more about Forrester's CX Index, BX Index, and Total Experience Score methodologies.
About Forrester
Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) is one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions to be bold at work and accelerate growth through customer obsession. Our unique research and continuous guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence. To learn more, visit Forrester.com.