Brand Loyalty is a positive feeling towards a brand and the tendency to buy from the same brand repeatedly over and over again. Brand loyalty is a sense of trust towards a brand that does not change with changes in environment or with competitor’s action. Word-of-mouth advocacy is another benefit of Brand Loyalty. It’s a dedication, an emotional engagement with the brand and should not be confused with habit.
Brand Loyalty is a gold every Brand dream of, but it’s not easy to get. It is something you work toward, a correct consistent process will eventually get you there. But don’t loose heart if it doesn’t happen overnight.
Create Brand Experience That Lasts
Benefits of brand loyalty
There are numerous benefits that Brand Loyalty can bring you. Some of them include:
- Makes it easier to launch new production or product extensions
- Make price irrelevant
- Competitive edge in market.
- Creating barriers for new entrants
- Reduces the marketing cost
- Easier to get new customers.
- Cheaper to serve existing customers
- Repeat buyers spend more money
The purpose
Other than the benefits mentioned above, Brand Loyalty is a good measure to use when trying to predict brand performance.
It is also a good indicator of chinks in marketing communication. You can look at the patterns of Brand Loyalty and pick out characteristics that make the product work.
Long-term impact
One of the most important factor in building brand loyalty is developing a emotional connection between the Brand and the consumer.
The relationship a brand aims for is two prong, it’s both behavioral and attitudinal. Behavioral bond decide if the customer will re-purchase or not, on the other hand the attitudinal is relate to the customer’s willingness to purchase product or service at any reasonable cost.
An example of behavioral loyalty is when consumer buy Starbucks Coffee when there are alternates easily available. When Starbucks is not available and the consumer refuse to buy alternate, that’s attitudinal loyalty.
Psychological behavior of attitude leads to the behavioral loyalty. Which in turn leads to repeat purchases. Therefore when you have taped into the psychology of your customers by creating quality product and experience, you have stuck gold.
Marketing campaigns to build brand loyalty
Marketing campaigns are designed after looking into consumer buying trends closely and targeted at building relationships with their customers through active customer service.
Consumer trends are consumer habits and behaviors displayed over time. These trends could be static, which do not change over time, whereas most are ever evolving.
Collecting and analyzing data of customer spending and responses to touch points over time provides dependable data on consumer trends. As a marketing professional it’s your job to track these trends and design marketing campaigns around them to help Brands create a loyal customer base.
Brand Ambassadors
Brands hire ambassadors to represent the brand in a positive light. By doing so increase brand’s awareness and appeal.
Brand ambassadors are chosen keeping the target market in mind. They are usually people with an appeal in the target market.
The role of the brand ambassador is to create a trust and pass on personal appeal to the brand and hence the fans.
The key element of brand ambassadors is their ability to use promotional strategies that will strengthen the customer-product-service relationship and influence a large audience to buy and consume more.
Don’t lose your loyal customers
Keep continually monitoring and analyzing consumer behavior over time to keep everything in line with the experience you have created for your customers.
Identify and modify or do value addition to your product or service to provide additional benefits to your customers.
Post purchase engagement is an another tool which will keep your customers loyal to the brand.
As everything else in marketing we want to keep our customer at the fore-front of every decision we make.
Role of digital media in creating and keeping brand loyalty
The biggest benefit of digital media is the power of instant feedback and the analytics. Be it A/B testing of your latest marketing campaign or customer feedback on product or service the internet has provided us all a cost effective way to connect with our audience.
It has also made it easy to create a tribe of loyal customers.
Use it wisely and you shall reap the benefits.
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Conclusion
Creating an army or loyal customer base is a dream of every business. Carefully created and cultivated brand loyalty can take your business to the next level. But don’t forget loyalty doesn’t come cheap, and it is not east to keep it. Having a solid business system and marketing plan is the key here.
We have just touched the surface of the brand loyalty. But I hope it has given you enough to start designing your brand experience that create Brand Loyalty
