How to build sustainable brand loyalty
By Yoram Kraus
Hear ye! Hear ye! It’s official –brand loyalty is dead. No pulse. A goner. RIP
This death knell is brought to you by myriad marketers who insist that the sheer volume and diversity of providers in the global marketplace, combined with pervasive corporate mistrust, and increased spending power of the swelling middle class, has eroded the concept of brand loyalty.
Once upon a time, fewer suppliers and the high-touch, more local nature of purchasing experiences meant that consumers stayed loyal to specific brands, consistently buying their food from the same stores and choosing their car from the same manufacturer.
Now, the proliferation of competitors has seen the marketshare of even household names plummet. Customers jump from provider to provider, abandoning loyalty as new products emerge promising even better results for a lower price.
It makes sense, right? Why stick to just one provider when you can shop around, try out brands with equal quality products, take advantage of the free postage offer of another brand, or snap up a limited 2-for-1 offer from its competitor?
There doesn’t seem to be much incentive for customers to embark on a monogamous relationship with a brand when there are so many juicy one-time trysts to indulge in.
Resurrecting brand loyalty
Loyalty is essentially liquid gold and having loyal customers on tap can transform a business’s bottom line and staying power. Converting new customers with increased brand visibility is great, but without consistent and persistent returns, companies will only see a short-term boost in revenue. And they’ll have to allocate significant resources to repeating their acquisition efforts over
And over
And over
Again.
In a business world obsessed with massive scale and big data, consumers have been reduced to a number, a datapoint, a statistic. Rarely do consumers feel like brands understand them and engage with them on their terms and as individuals.
Too often brands have made the mistake of bombarding their audience with attempts to engage them as frequently and for as long a time as possible. Brands are forgetting their consumers are HUMAN BEINGS. Which human being in their right mind wants to be bothered all day every day with notifications and engagement? Nobody, no matter how much they love and are loyal to the brand. Today, real brand loyalty hangs on a brand’s ability to know WHEN and HOW to engage according to their own authentic, unique preferences.
Just take a look at these stats:
81% of U.S. consumers feel loyal to brands that are there when they need them, but otherwise, respect their time and leave them alone.
41 percent of US respondents to a 2017 Accenture Strategy survey said they are ‘loyal to brands that offer them the opportunity to personalize products to create something that is bespoke to them’.
Similarly, 51 percent are ‘loyal to brands that interact with them through their preferred channels of communication.
Re-orienting the scramble for data for quantity to quality
The challenge is how to know what individual consumers want, and how to deliver it.
Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day has been created every day over the past two years. But what good is this data if we can’t select the right datapoints and analyze and process it in a way that yields accurate, meaningful insights about our audience? How can this all contribute to understanding your customers without relying on generalizations and the kind of group segmenting and predictions that have come to dominate entire industries?
It’s crucial that going forward the pendulum swings back to prioritizing quality data over quantity – that we use intricate, tested models to form a clear picture of who our users are. Empathy must dominate every aspect of marketing and sales. Empathize with your customers’ problems and painpoints, understand the challenges that they are experiencing, appreciate them as individuals and meet their needs as and when they need them.
By excelling in this, brands will be able to forge a deeper, emotional connection with their consumers. And the results will speak for themselves.
INFI is the new standard for providing flawless, authentic user engagement. Our pioneering technology combines sophisticated psychology models with powerful predictive algorithms to yield in-depth insights into the individual personality traits, feelings, preferences and motivators of every single user. This unique and powerful ability can be customized to any industry, so you can find out what really matters to your audience, what every individual really needs, and customize their journey accordingly.
About Yoram Kraus
Yoram Kraus, Infibond Co-Founder & CEO
Yoram Kraus is a serial entrepreneur, with several investments in high tech over the past decade. He has more than 20 years of entrepreneurship in real estate & global engineering projects, and is the founder of the second-largest REIT fund in Israel. He has a degree in Civil Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, he served as an intelligence officer in the IDF special forces and is a keen mountaineer and extreme sportsman.