Brand loyalty: the new marketing mantra

Once upon a time, customers used to be just a few numbers that you added up to get your total sales. In those days, your customers had limited options on where to shop and what they could buy. Fast forward to the day when consumers have so many product choices and can shop from literally thousands of companies spread across the globe. For example, consider shoes. A person who wants to buy a pair of shoes has thousands of shoes to choose from and several hundred companies. As a shoe manufacturer, his goal would be to create something in his shoes that the consumer will not find anywhere else. You would strive to create more comfortable, stylish and better fitting shoes for the customer to buy from you.

Basically, this changes the entire dynamic of the customer-business relationship. The customer now has the power in most cases and companies are fighting around him to get his attention. In the last decade, ‘customer loyalty’ has become the holy grail of researchers and marketers around the world. Traditional ways of measuring success by conducting customer satisfaction surveys didn’t seem to make sense as they realized that customer satisfaction doesn’t necessarily result in repeat purchases.

The chances of a customer giving you repeat business definitely increase if they are happy with a previous purchase of your product. But chances are you can easily get carried away by the barrage of advertisements that bombard you from all sides. So with this paradigm shift, ‘customer loyalty’ became the latest buzzword to measure the success of any marketing department.

Several studies have shown that customers become loyal when they repeat an outstanding experience with a product over time. Not only that, they become emotionally attached to your product, which could make them not act rationally the next time they buy your product. They become more tolerable if you mess up your product at some point. They recommend your product to their friends and family and are not easily swayed by the latest fads or price differences. In short, they not only buy your product, but also act as evangelists for your products. And we all know that word of mouth marketing is the most effective there is.

One of the best examples we see today is Apple’s cult Macintosh. These Mac fans use all things made by Apple. They have gone through a lot of trouble to coexist in a world dominated by PCs. They wait in line for hours (sometimes even days) before the release of a new Apple product. With loyal customers like these, repeat business with them is almost guaranteed. This is exactly why marketing companies try to develop a similar emotional connection between consumers and their products. Because they know that if they can achieve this brand loyalty, everything else will come naturally.