Brand loyalty needs to be understood correctly by small brands. The first thing to know is that normally, by psychology, a customer is inclined to be loyal to a brand he has bought – simply because the purchase represents a choice he has made and he does not like to feel or accept that he has made a poor choice. His ego works in favour of his loyalty to a brand, because it will make him defend his purchase and self-validate his purchase and investment. Most brand loyalty failures, however, happen because something MAKES the customer switch his loyalty for a reason. He doesn’t TAKE the decision to switch unless he is forced to regret his original decision. Brand loyalty is a kind of default mode, so as a brand you need to focus on increasing whatever positively affirms or reinforces a customer’s brand loyalty … and you need to decrease whatever puts off the reluctantly-departing customer!
Three critical factors that could act as triggers for customers to leave brands!
You’d be surprised at some of the most important reasons why customers switch brand loyalties. Contrary to what many of us think, we may inadvertently be doing exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to preserve brand loyalty in our hard-won customers!
#1: The company has brand fatigue and the customer catches the virus!
In his book “Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time”, the author Matt Haig talks of brand fatigue of companies being more prevalent than brand fatigue of customers! He writes:
Some companies get bored with their own brands. You can see this happening to products which have been on the shelves for many years, collecting dust. When brand fatigue sets in creativity suffers, and so do sales.
James Heaton of the Tronvig Group further elaborates exactly what businesses do wrong when they are hit by brand fatigue:
What I mean by brand fatigue may not be what others mean by it. My concern with brand fatigue is not that people become tired of a brand, but rather that businesses become prematurely tired of their own brand presentation and, as a result, push to change it before it has had the opportunity to fulfil its mission or even fully register and build power in the minds of their brand consumers. If a brand is authentic, true, and well executed, if it exhibits brand health, aligns with the mission and values of the business, or speaks to the key attributes of the business’ products or services, there should be no reason to tire of it. The great Robin Wight summarizes this quite succinctly, “It’s certainly true that clients tend to throw away brand assets too early.”
And yet there persists a drive to keep changing things, and this is aided and abetted by ad agencies who, of course, make money by continually creating new material for their clients. Sometimes this makes sense. People do get tired of the same TV commercial. For essential brand matters, however, the race is won by those who are most consistent. The thing about consistency is that it is really only boring to those who are dealing with it unnaturally closely every day; in a world characterized by clutter and overstimulation, absolute consistency is a key attribute of any strong and healthy brand. I have seen executives tire of seeing the “same thing” over and over, and be unable to resist the temptation to say “I’m sick of blue. Can we do this in another color?”. This is understandable.
I would argue though that the outside experience of the brand – the brand as it resides alongside its competitors – is quite different, and this kind of brand fatigue often seems to set in just as the brand is actually beginning to leave an impression, just as it is beginning to sink in and lodge in its proper place in the minds of the brand’s consumers.
So you see, customers don’t tire of brands as easily as the businesses themselves do, and if you are a small brand with itchy fingers, you have to restrain yourself from fiddling with brand consistency just as it is about to ingrain itself into the consumer’s psyche!
#2: The brand doesn’t anticipate “buyer remorse” and the “fallow phase”!
In marketing and sales there are two concepts to be very wary of, especially when considering brand loyalty.
The first is what experts call “buyer remorse”, which happens just immediately after a purchase is made. Wikipedia explains buyer remorse as:
Buyer remorse is the sense of regret after having made a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of an expensive item such as a car or house. It may stem from fear of making the wrong choice, guilt over extravagance, or a suspicion of having been overly influenced by the seller. Buyer’s remorse is thought to stem from cognitive dissonance, specifically post-decision dissonance, that arises when a person must make a difficult decision, such as a heavily invested purchase between two similarly appealing alternatives. Factors that affect buyer’s remorse include resources invested, the involvement of the purchaser, whether the purchase is compatible with the purchaser’s goals, and what positive or negative evidence the purchaser encounters post-purchase that confirms or denies the purchase as a good idea.
In other words, a person, immediately after a purchase is extremely vulnerable to some psychological pressures that make him “regret” having made the purchase, but usually this is a fleeting moment and soon rights itself. Nevertheless, it’s a critical juncture when a brand has to hand-hold a customer very tightly, and reassure him that his decision was just perfect!
Closely associated with buyer-remorse is the tendency that experts call the “fallow phase”, when just after (and despite!) a SATISFACTORY purchase experience the buyer itches to switch brand loyalties! Roger Sinclair of Prophet writes about this phenomenon:
“Why do clients who have expressed satisfaction at the conclusion of a service encounter too frequently appoint an alternative service provider when next they have a need for the service? For example, an architect whose client expressed complete satisfaction on completion of a project is surprised to find the next project given to a competitor. Often the firm that believes it is the incumbent in a relationship learns that it has not been appointed for new work only when it sees another name on the project board.
Three things seem to help lure away the customer in the fallow-phase:
1. The customer’s own need for novelty of experience.
2. The battery of relentless targeted communications by the competitor that finally pay off.
3. The long time gaps that the brand allows to creep into its relationship-maintenance with its post-purchase customers.
So this again is something brands have to anticipate and guard against!
#3: In a bid to retain loyalty, the brand over-services customers to the point of being tiresome!
I think we’ve all seen examples of this when we travel and stay in hotels, where the staff have been told that “hospitality equals show of concern”. I personally get so tired by the repeated knocking on my room door with solicitous staff asking if I am OK, do I need something, why I should not hesitate to ask, is the temperature of the room OK, and how would I rate the service so far on a scale of ten? The curious thing is that I always turn the board outside my door knob to “Do Not Disturb” but the staff think that is for visitors and not for them. In fact they even knock after they see the board to confirm if I want not to be disturbed! Phew! How would I be loyal to a brand that simply tires me out with its concern. Does the brand even know how desperately I want to put as much distance as I can between me and the brand, and how I’d give an arm and a leg to be rid of that pester-power?
I guess it’s the same with brands that overdo emailing, or overdo the post-interaction follow up feedback ratings!
4 ways that small brands can get smart about retaining customer loyalty!
If you’ve managed to avoid doing all of the above that puts a customer off the concept of brand loyalty, you can then focus on doing a few things right.
SMART LOYALTY-ENHANCING IDEA #1: Let customers return to a changing experience!
Among the smart ways to make a customer feel loyal to a brand is the idea of “fresh experiences”. A relationship between a brand and a customer is more or less like a marriage, some experts say, and there’s a tendency on the part of both to take each other for granted over time. So it pays to look at ways to make the “partner” sit up and take notice of your brand now and then and say “What’s this? I am liking it!”. Novelty never hurts a relationship, and it applies to brand experiences too. Especially long-term customers need something fresh to return to in the brand relationship every now and again! And creating these fresh experiences takes some creativity and innovative thinking on the brand marketer’s side, but the investment is always worth it, because it costs six times more to get a new customer than it takes to retain an old one!
SMART LOYALTY-ENHANCING IDEA #2: Reward customers not for loyalty but for advocacy!
There are a number of brands that do a drumroll when they announce their loyalty rewards programs and loyalty cards. But here’s a bit of customer psychology again. A customer feels great, sure enough, when he’s rewarded for loyalty, but he feels greater – and supremely high in status – if he’s been rewarded for advocacy. If he’s rewarded for his loyalty, you are saying to him “Thanks for investing in us!” and if you are rewarding him for being your brand ambassador and advocating your brand to others, you are saying to him “Thanks for lending your influential power to our voices!” Now which of these statements, do you think, will make him feel on top of the world? Besides, there’s one more benefit. Research shows that if people are asked to advocate a brand to others, to become influencers, they willy-nilly become loyal to the brand they advocate!
SMART LOYALTY-ENHANCING IDEA #3: Fix mistakes with a “Thanks, Partner!” approach!
When a brand has made some servicing mistakes with customers, there is a real chance of losing brand reputation and loyalty, right? But some smart brands have learnt to give the customer a great feeling even when they have screwed up! They thank the customer for being a true and supportive partner … and especially for allowing them to learn how to do things better, because the customer is such an inspiration! This works beautifully most of the time, because it reduces ire and beckons at the customer’s forgiving and large-hearted side!
SMART LOYALTY-ENHACING IDEA #4: Learn the concept of “Intermittent Positive Reinforcement”!
This is a very interesting concept for brands to know – the “Intermittent Positive Reinforcement” concept! In a research conducted initially with rats it was found that when you didn’t feed the rates, they didn’t care about the feeder. Also when they were fed regularly a consistent quantity at a consistent time, they again did not seem to heed the feeder much. (You could say, they looked at the feeder with disdain!). But when the feeder decided to always give them some food when she appeared in the room but she gave varying quantities at unexpected times, the rats displayed maximum exuberance to see her. They could trust she would never fail them, but they never had the satisfaction of knowing when the food would come and how much would come. The same idea was then researched on couples, and found to be true of relationships. When couples could always trust their partners, but never know when and how much of themselves they would give, there was no “taking for granted”. The moral of the story is that loyalty is strengthened by Positive-But-Intermittent-Reinforcement. The “positive” part can be trusted, the “intermittent” part is forever a guessing game. Can your brand give customers this combination of certainty and uncertainty, and thus hold loyalty?
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