Kantar launches Kantar Experience Impact, powered by Qualtrics, to link customer experience to brand growth

LONDON: Brand teams and customer experience teams have long played the same game from different rulebooks. Kantar now wants them on one page. On 6 October 2026, Kantar, the world’s leading brand intelligence business, launched Kantar Experience Impact, powered by the Qualtrics® platform, a customer experience solution that connects customer experiences to brand strength and so helps organisations decide where to invest for growth.

The problem it tackles is a familiar one. Many organisations measure customer experience, brand tracking and operational data separately. As a result, they struggle to see which experiences make the biggest impact on their brand. Kantar Experience Impact brings those perspectives together, so that leaders can clearly link customer experience decisions to brand outcomes.

The engine is a pairing of two strengths. The solution combines Kantar’s Meaningful Different Salient framework, which underpins decades of brand growth research, with Qualtrics’ Experience Management Platform® to show how experiences strengthen or weaken the perceptions that drive growth. It helps organisations benchmark performance against competitors, pinpoint what is influencing consumers and choose the actions most likely to strengthen brand equity.

For customer experience, marketing and insights leaders, this offers clear decision-making support on three counts:

• Which touchpoints influence customer perceptions the most
• Where competitors are creating strong experiences and how to close those gaps
• How to build a compelling case for experience investment that will positively impact brand growth

There is a twist that sets it apart. Unlike traditional CX programmes that focus only on existing customers, Kantar Experience Impact combines the views of customers and non-customers to show how experiences shape brand perceptions across the whole market. It can also be enriched with voice of customer, operational and brand data, so that organisations can understand what is happening and why.

Early results are telling. Early deployments have shown that distinctiveness is won or lost in a small number of moments. In one pilot for a European telco, the perception gap was sharpest among first-year customers, pointing to onboarding as a decisive point in shaping how that brand is judged.

Anand Parameswaran, executive director and lead (West India) at Kantar, said: “Kantar Experience Impact, powered by Qualtrics, represents a significant step forward in helping organisations connect brand and customer experience through a common language. By combining Kantar’s Meaningfully Different framework with Qualtrics’ technology, it provides a clearer understanding of the experiences that shape perceptions and drive meaningful differentiation. For clients, this means moving beyond isolated CX metrics to a holistic view of how experiences influence brand equity, supported by richer signals, AI-powered insights, and clearer guidance on the moments that matter most. The result is a practical roadmap that helps turn customer feedback into action, linking experience improvements to stronger brand growth and commercial impact. Improved experiences are more likely to increase a brand’s market share by 2.5x.”

Adam Block, chief sales officer at Qualtrics, said: “For too long, CX and brand teams have worked from different playbooks. Kantar Experience Impact brings them together. By pairing Kantar’s proven understanding of how brands grow with Qualtrics’ industry-leading Experience Management Platform, we’re giving organisations an integrated view of how every interaction shapes the way their brand is perceived, and the confidence to act on it. It’s a great example of what Kantar and Qualtrics can achieve together, and we’re proud to bring it to market on World CX Day.”

Kantar Experience Impact has been developed in partnership with Qualtrics and is available through the Qualtrics platform and marketplace. It supports sectors where customer experience strongly influences growth, including retail, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and hospitality, and any category where customer experience plays a critical role in growth.