Brand loyalty is an emotional connection based on perceptions and trust that the brand will meet consumers’ expectations. You have to work to keep it.
beyond inception with TIRIVASHE MUNDONDO
It’s hard to keep consumers loyal to your brand if you don’t know why they’re loyal to it. What are their perceptions of the brand? What are their motivations for buying it? What factors influence their purchase decisions? What feelings does the brand evoke and how do they feel if the brand isn’t available?
These are just some of the questions that can help you better understand why consumers are loyal to your brand, and you can get the answers through market research. As with all relationships, you have to work to keep them going and cultivate them so they flourish. Brand loyalty is a relationship between consumers and a brand backed by a company.
Don’t underestimate the need to cultivate that relationship. If customers feel like the brand is no longer meeting their needs or is letting them down, the time will come when they’ll give up on the relationship and find a replacement — no matter how hard that might be for them.
I have used this example in one of my previous articles: The Walt Disney Company provides a great example of a company that understands how important brand loyalty is and cultivates that relationship through every consumer touchpoint. In “Disney’s Approach to Brand Loyalty” course at the Disney Institute, the company shares its position on the importance of building relationships to maintain brand loyalty:
“Many customers will discontinue their relationship with an organisation because they gained a perception that the business didn’t care. Empower your staff to spontaneously create relationship moments with your customers. When you surpass the experience offered by your competition, and when you add to that by exceeding expectations at every point of contact, you hold the key that will keep bringing customers back.”
Consumers have more choices available to them than ever and they’re inundated with messages every day. Therefore, consumers are more fickle than ever. You have to work to keep them by consistently communicating with them and meeting their expectations through branded experiences. Fortunately, the social web provides a myriad of opportunities to do exactly that, which will be discussed in greater detail in Part 4 of this series.
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Conducting brand research to maintain brand loyalty
You need to know that you’re always meeting consumers’ needs, which are constantly changing. Brand research is more important than ever for maintaining brand loyalty. You should conduct informal market research by simply listening to consumer conversations and feedback about your brand. It’s easy to find these conversations online. Setup Google Alerts for your brand name and use a Twitter app like Monitter.com to monitor keyword mentions of your brand name in tweets.
At the same time, you should conduct formal market research to learn more about consumers’ emotional involvement with your brand, their degree of loyalty, and their expectations.
Also, brand research can help you identify potential gaps and weaknesses in your brand strategy before it’s too late and loyal customers are disappointed. In other words, your research data should be used to proactively create brand strategies, messages, and experiences that retain and strengthen brand loyalty.
If you’ve ever joined a membership or rewards programme, then you’ve identified yourself as a loyal customer. The extent of that loyalty varies from brand-to-brand and customer-to-customer, but by joining a programme that rewards repeat purchasers, you’ve expressed some degree of loyalty to the brand.
The trick for marketers is to deepen the relationship, strengthen the emotional connection, and increase the perceived switching costs among its audience of repeat purchasers. That’s how you move repurchasers to loyalists.
There are many ways to do it, and some examples are included below to help you get started.
Reward programmes
Rewards programmes are great for encouraging customers to repurchase a brand, but they’re not always appropriate for deepening the level of brand loyalty that consumers feel toward a brand. That’s because they’re very short-term focused. Rather than rewarding loyal consumers for their emotional connections to the brand, they reward members for purchasing.
The trick in creating a rewards programme that actually deepens loyalty is to offer specific rewards to true brand loyalists above and beyond the rewards used to encourage repurchasing.
Switching costs
What tangible and intangible value does your brand provide to consumers? What is the emotional, physical, and financial cost of that value? In other words, what would consumers feel like they have to give up if they switch from your brand to a competitor’s brand? It’s that real and perceived switching cost that is the essence of brand loyalty.
Conduct research to identify what those switching costs are and create marketing campaigns that highlight those costs in order to increase loyalty to your brand even more. You want loyal consumers to feel like that switching cost is insurmountable. However, don’t create monetary switching costs that trap consumers into doing business with you.
For example, the high switching costs charged to switch from one cellular carrier to another are perceived as a negative and a trap by consumers, not a benefit. You want to create positive perceived switching costs based on emotional connections and value, not penalties.
Brand experiences
Surround consumers with branded experiences so they can self-select how they want to interact with your brand and deepen their emotional connections to it. Social media offers an incredible opportunity to create branded experiences through content, conversations, and communities.
For example, there are online communities for Ford Mustang owners, Harley Davidson owners, Mini Cooper owners, Bentley owners, and more! Each of these brands demonstrates how branded communities (created by the company or by consumers) should be encouraged. They’re a perfect place for people to share branded experiences, which leads to deeper brand relationships.
Think about the many ways you can use content across the social web to create branded experiences. YouTube channels, Facebook pages, blogs, and more can all become branded online destinations where consumers can interact with your brand. The trick is to provide valuable content that is meaningful to your target consumers.
Furthermore, you can create offline branded experiences. Whether you offer seminars, host an event, or attend a trade show, you have opportunities to deepen consumers’ relationships with your brand which leads to brand loyalty.
Brand extensions and expansion
Remember, consumers are constantly changing, so your brand strategy needs to be flexible enough to evolve with your customers and the market. Just be careful and make sure that any extensions and expansions you pursue are consistent with your brand promise and will appropriately fit with consumers’ perceptions and expectations for the brand.
The last thing you want to do is confuse or alienate your brand loyalists. It’s harder and more expensive to get new customers than it is to keep existing customers, so don’t turn your back on your loyal audience.
Tirivashe Mundondo is an author and brand strategist. He is passionate about innovative marketing techniques and creative solutions. Email: [email protected]
