The entire purpose of a brand is to encourage loyalty to your product. Products without brands are commodities. Loyalty is often the only reason that a consumer chooses one brand over another. Yet, loyalty is one of those ephemeral things that few marketers really understand. That’s largely because there are different kinds of loyalty, and it’s often not understood how that applies to marketing.

Family loyalty - When you’ll do something for someone not because you like them, but because you’re related, that’s family loyalty. This is something of an unattainably holy grail in marketing, reflected by companies that use folksy pitches and appeals that can border on guilt.

Football loyalty - Players are 100% loyal to their teams, right up until the day they get traded. Then they’re loyal to their new team. Ever wonder why somebody can be a “Levi’s man” for years, and the suddenly start wearing Wranglers exclusively? It’s not that they get paid to do so – it’s because they feel betrayed by their old brand, and realign their self-image to be in tune with the replacement brand. When someone switches brands it’s like switching teams – they don’t retain even a scrap of loyalty to their former fave.

Price/Feature loyalty - This one’s flaky to the extreme. There’s always someone who can beat you on price, and sometimes beat you on features. The only way to counter this kind of loyalty is to create a stronger loyalty to your brand.

Brand Image loyalty - Create a great brand, and you tell a story. If you can get consumers to associate their self-image with that brand message, you can lock them in as customers. This is why branding is so important – and why your brand message MUST be uniform, consistent, and resonant.

Habitual loyalty - Consumers are creatures of habit. They will often stick with a brand, just because they have always bought it – until the day that brand no longer lives up to it’s image. A few years ago, I used to buy Vermont Maid syrup. Why? My mom used that brand, and it was good enough for me. Until the day it wasn’t. They changed the product – cheapened it, to where it no longer had the taste or quality that it did before. So I switched, and never looked back.

So what does this mean to you? It means you need to figure out why your customers are loyal to your brand. It’s also helpful to try and learn why customers are loyal to your competition. Understand that, and you’ve got the key to understanding how and why your marketing does – or doesn’t – work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.