Forrester’s Total Experience Score Exposes Tesla’s Brand Dichotomy: Loved By Customers, Shunned By Prospective Buyers

July 01, 2025 at 09:35 AM EDT

According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) Global Total Experience Score Rankings, 2025, while Tesla enjoys a strong brand perception among its customers, it fails to connect with potential buyers, and represents the widest perception gap across more than 400 brands evaluated across 10 industries and 13 countries. The auto manufacture achieved a customer score of 72.5 points, exceeding the industry benchmark, and even outperformed highly regarded brands like Honda, Toyota, and Volvo. However, its non-customer score of 33.3 points underscores a substantial perception gap among potential buyers, signaling a disconnect that could hinder future growth for the company, if not addressed. Furthermore, these results highlight Tesla’s brand paradox: weak on consumer trust, strong on customer experience.

Forrester’s research shows that brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX) are two sides of the same coin. To help companies understand the duality between the two, Forrester recently unveiled Total Experience Score, a new metric that integrates scores from Forrester’s Brand Experience Index (BX Index™) and its long-standing Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) to generate a single score that reflects how both non-customers and customers perceive a brand.

Companies that want to grow revenue must align their initiatives along two vectors: win new customers and serve existing customers to generate revenue from retention and enrichment. The non-customer and customer components of the Total Experience Score are further plotted on a “growth grid.” This is a snapshot of how successful a company is at both winning and serving customers, and how it stacks up against its peers. On the growth grid, brands occupy one of four quadrants:

Leading. These brands’ prospects trust them and hold them in high consideration, and their customers feel well-served and eager for continued engagement.
Plateauing. Although these brands score highly with their existing customers, they rank low among non-customers, making it challenging to attract new customers.
Churning. These brands acquire customers successfully, but churn with alacrity — which could have a potentially devastating financial outcome, especially when acquisition costs are high.
Lagging. The brands in this quadrant are characterized by poor overall performance. They have low scores among both customers and non-customers.

“Our research debunks the idea that Tesla’s brand is uniformly declining,” said Keith Johnston, group research director at Forrester. “Tesla is a compelling case study in the divergence between customer experience and brand perception. While Tesla remains top-of-mind for many non-customers, boasting above-average salience, they are less likely to perceive it as trustworthy, and even less inclined to buy it. When companies align their brand promise with their customer experiences across both customer and non-customer segments, they can unlock up to 3.5x revenue growth and significantly boost customer loyalty.”

Forrester’s Total Experience Score, BX Index, and CX Index rankings and results 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 and CX Index annual benchmarking exercise to measure the interconnectedness between brand and customer experience.

Resources:

Learn more about Forrester's CX Index, BX Index, and Total Experience Score methodologies.
Discover how the Total Experience Score empowers brand and customer experience teams to work in true alignment.

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.