Brand loyalty is the holy grail of brand-building. It improves everything from market share to profitability, and makes your customers less sensitive to things like price and competition.
But, for most companies, it remains painfully elusive. In this article, we’ll explain exactly how you can build greater brand loyalty by engaging emotionally with your customers.
Brand Loyalty Versus Awareness, Affinity and Equity
Corporate branding is an incredibly complex topic – and one that many marketers and business leaders define differently. That’s not the focus of this article. But we do need to clarify 4 related terms: brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand affinity, and brand equity.
Brand awareness (or salience) is probably the most well-understood. In simple terms, it’s how much mindshare your brand has – specifically, in the context of the problems you solve and the solutions you provide. Have your ideal buyers heard of you? Do they know what you do? Would they think about you as a potential solutions provider when trying to solve a relevant problem? Those are all questions that can help you gauge your brand awareness levels.
Brand affinity builds on awareness. Your ideal buyers may have heard of you, but do they like you? Affinity can be defined as the level of emotional valence and arousal your ideal buyers have towards you. Positive valence and high arousal equals high brand affinity.
(Brand affinity is also different to brand image, which is how stakeholders perceive your brand generally, and brand reputation, which is earned through interactions with stakeholders over time. Don’t worry if that’s a little confusing. The important thing is understanding that these terms are all different.)
Brand loyalty is the extent to which customers continue to select your brand from among a consideration set of competing brands over time. Put simply: how likely is it that your customers will repurchase from you? Loyalty can be broken down into 3 dimensions: behaviours, emotions (attitudinal), cognition (attitudinal). Building loyalty across every dimension matters – the more skeins your loyalty ‘rope’ has, the stronger it is.
For example, a brand might have good behavioural loyalty; according to its metrics, customers keep coming back. But that could be due to other factors, like a high switching cost or low competition. If those factors change and the other loyalty dimensions aren’t strong, the brand is likely to experience a mass exodus of customers who were ‘trapped’ rather than loyal per see.
Finally, brand equity is the outcome of all brand-building efforts. It’s how much additional value a brand adds to an offering. Brand equity is a major component of goodwill and can substantially increase a business’s valuation.
How to Increase Brand Loyalty Through Emotional Engagement
Now that we know what brand loyalty is, here are 3 ways you can increase the strength of your emotional ‘skein’.
1. Win Loyalty Through Loyalty
The simplest way to improve your brand loyalty is by being loyal to your existing customers. The principle of reciprocity is a concept that underpins all social relationships. When someone treats us a certain way, we generally respond in kind. While a brand isn’t a person, it’s still an entity we can reciprocate with.
Reciprocity is the basis of all loyalty programs. The more a customer buys, the more they’re rewarded through discounts, points, and other benefits. The catch, of course, is that these programs don’t actually trigger reciprocity – they work because customers cognitively realise the benefits of loyalty, rather than because they’re emotionally engaged.
Good loyalty programs feel authentic and personalised. A customer should believe you and your staff actually care about them (rather than just having a loyalty program to increase stickiness or because it’s the industry standard). Often, that can mean surprising and delighting long-standing customers. It can also include a policy of exclusivity, like Hermès’ famous requirements that customers ‘work up’ to products like the Birkin bag by buying different, lower-cost items over time.
(The opposite of loyalty programs are ‘switch-and-save’ deals, where new customers get benefits and old ones are neglected. These rely on existing customers forgetting to regularly compare offers; those that do are actively incentivised to switch brands.)
2. Be Decent
An often-overlooked component of brand loyalty is to act decently. No, ‘decency’ is not some obscure marketing term. We’re talking about the kind of ethical behaviour that often gets shunted aside in pursuit of profit. It’s a bit like obscenity – you know it when you see it. A good litmus test is: would you like it if you or a loved one was treated the same way by a brand?
Being decent means being honest – like accurately representing your expertise and not shifting the blame for failures. It means not misleading buyers with promotional tactics that border on illegal. It means notifying subscribers when they’re due for an auto-renewal and not harassing people with cold calls. It means actively trying to help your customers instead of treating them as cash cows to be milked.
Many decent behaviours are legislated (thankfully). But that doesn’t stop both large and small businesses from regularly acting the wrong way – just look at the ACCC’s news feed. If you want to improve customer loyalty, enhance your brand, and reduce your liability risk, make a habit of reviewing your organisation’s ethical conduct.
3. Match Their Values
Earlier, we mentioned that the emotional and cognitive dimensions of brand loyalty are both attitudinal – that is, relating to the attitudes, values and beliefs of buyers. The motivations that underpin these dimensions fall into 4 categories:
- utilitarian (where consumers are loyal because the brand performs better than its competitors on selection criteria)
- value-expressive (where consumers are loyal because a brand expresses or is consistent with their values)
- ego-defensive (where consumers are loyal because that purchase choice best supports their self-esteem)
- knowledge (where consumers are loyal because they know what to expect from the brand – the future outcome of a purchase is less ambiguous).
Utilitarianism, ego defensiveness, and knowledge aren’t within this article’s scope. But value expression is, and it matters a lot. That’s probably not surprising. We know that legitimate ESG claims, for example, correlate strongly with various brand loyalty metrics. When you align your brand’s behaviours with the values of your ideal buyers, you’re strengthening that emotional skein, and giving them yet another reason to keep buying from you.
Value expression doesn’t have to be costly. Look at Coca-Cola’s now-famous approach to the Orthodox Jewish market. Every year, the company produces Passover bottles, a kosher version of standard Cokes signified by yellow bottlecaps. It’s a simple but effective way of saying: we stand with what you believe in.
The reverse is true too. When brands support actions or express values that don’t align with their ideal buyers’, they’ll quickly erode any built-up loyalty. So work out what the people you serve care about, then make sure your brand reflects those attitudes. Just choose wisely – taking a firm stance on anything will always involve alienating those who don’t agree.
Summary
The relationship between a customer and a brand is, like most relationships, messy. Pragmatism plays a key role in building loyalty. But so does emotion – the poorly understood driver of so many human behaviours. There are 3 main ways you can strengthen the emotional skein of your loyalty rope. (A fourth tactic, which merits its own article, is to build a community around your brand.)
- Win loyalty by first being loyal.
- As a brand, act decently.
- Match your brand’s behaviours and values with those of your ideal buyers.
Each of these sounds simple. They’re not. Many, many brands try and fail to execute them successfully. Often, that failure stems from having a misaligned brand identity – which is the kind of strategic flaw that will slowly derail everything from product development to sales pitches.
If you want to review the strength of your current brand, schedule a consultation with us. Branding is a whole-of-business function, but, as a full-service agency, we often act as unbiased sounding boards for our clients, giving them the guidance they need to make small, impactful changes – and implement initiatives like those we’ve discussed in this article.
