Yesterday I came across a great piece by Luca Paderni on iMedia Connection entitled “Why Your Brand Loyalty is Failing”. Luca covers pretty well all the angles and raises many important issues, but there’s no escaping the underlying truth that kept surfacing among the other well-made points – customer loyalty is simply a product of customer satisfaction.
I run many workshops on this subject with businesses around the world and I’m used to receiving a torrent of ideas from delegates for programmes and initiatives designed to reward loyalty. Sadly I get fewer ideas for ensuring that the brand promise that brought customers to the point of purchase in the first place is delivered. If my delegates are indicative of the people driving marketing these days, its hardly surprising that the focus of so many businesses appear to be trying to buy rather than earn customer love. And they do this regardless of the fact that it’s a ludicrously expensive and extremely short-term way to run a business.
These days loyalty is the dominant business driver. With most customers already claimed/assigned to vendors (apart from in emerging markets there are few emerging customers) the return you’ll get on acquisition investment is always going to be limited and its hard work. The future lies in selling more stuff to your existing customers and they’ll only buy if they love you. The problem is there seems to be confusion among marketers over what drives these brandships.
Sure customers will appreciate add-ons and freebies, They’ll add to the customer experience, but they only have value if you have already given your customers what they came for and simply will never be an alternative to simply delivering your brand promise. My advice to any business that asks me about customer loyalty is to start by measuring customer satisfaction. There’s only one way to do this and that’s by measuring your performance against your brand promise and the pillars that support it. (see the tab for Brand Discovery above for definitions.
Yes, there is no escaping it. It’s back to my old favourite, the Brand Model again, because that’s where everything in any successful organisation has to start and it’s why my Brand Discovery programme places so much up-front emphasis on this vital business tool. If you have set about creating your Brand Model correctly and placed the appropriate emphasis on marketing it internally, if you have developed the right briefing processes and checks to back it up, everyone (and I do mean everyone) in your organisation will be focussed on delivering your Brand Promise and none of your customers will be disappointed. THEN the rewards that everyone seems so keen to give away can make sense.
Michael Weaver
June 17, 2011