Customer Loyalty | Fans Into Fanatics
Strategic frameworks for uncovering, nurturing, and retaining high-value customers. The fundamentals and alternative perspectives that form profitable and effective customer loyalty programs.
How to Build Brand Loyalty
When a customer’s personal values align with the brand, it creates an unparalleled loyalty that translates into sales, referrals, growth, and goodwill. The holy grail for any brand is to find loyal, stable, and high-value customers who relate to the brand on a personal level, not just at a transactional level. But the process of building brand loyalty is changing. It is no longer a tower to be climbed step by step, but a labyrinth to be navigated, as the challenges brands face are indirect, complex, and discontinuous.
This is because building loyalty now requires more than adapting to a changing market and audience. It involves facing viral media attacks due to the online disinhibition effect and societal influences. Because of this, loyalty marketing is more than just creating a points program or member benefits. It involves continuously investing in brand management, CRM, consumer insights, and marketing performance analysis.
Defining Audience Priorities
Best-in-class loyalty is constructed at scale through three essential pillars:
WHO: A strong understanding of their core and most profitable audiences
WHAT: The alignment of the brand's purpose, mission, and vision with their core audiences
HOW: A multidimensional four-quadrant approach leveraging at least two of the audience segments
The four quadrants are constructed based on the level of customer engagement and the type of interaction with the brand. One can then determine where your brand aligns with the consumer and the type of loyalty tactic creates the optimal relationship with your brand.
Once you've determined the alignment of your brand with your high-value customers, follow these 4 key elements of creating strong customer loyalty and continuous growth:
PROVIDE THE BEST FOR YOUR BEST: Get to know your customers, utilizing data and models to identify and develop treatments that cultivate and protect your best customers while recognizing and growing look-alikes.
BOOST VALUE AT EVERY TURN: Constantly remind your customers about making the most of their product/service. Have an always-on playback with real-time customer data and visualization. Tailor communications on how to maximize value and trigger specific communications based on their usage and behaviors.
MITIGATE AND EASE PAIN: Identify and collaborate with a core team that can define KPIs, drive change, and merchandise loyalty initiatives. Hone in on customer pain points to educate and rebuild brand affinity post-bad experience.
MEASURE AND OPTIMIZE: Prove the effectiveness of your loyalty program by introducing a loyalty scoring index that measures progress against business KPIs and customer emotional metrics toward your brand.
Committed Management
Brand is a reflection of the customer purchasing process and ongoing relationship, and management practices definitely affect its success. For a brand to sustain success, there needs to be a concerted effort to deliver dynamic and personalized communications. If the leaders of an organization do not see brand and CRM as investments and as continuous ones, it doesn’t take long for the brand to become irrelevant.
Brands need to constantly listen to their high-value customers and, if needed, examine, tweak, and test their product or service offerings, as well as visual elements such as slogans, color schemes, logos, and packaging. It’s a fine balance between creating a consistent legacy. For example, Coca-Cola has not changed its logo in decades, yet it continuously updates its creative treatment to stay relevant in consumers' minds.
So the best way to build brand loyalty is to become powerful—boldly powerful, because power is never given, it is always taken. Be strong. It doesn’t matter if there are protests against your industry. It doesn’t matter that your product is not suitable for everyone. You do not need to be perfect; you need to be clear and truthful about who you are and where you stand. Boldly assert your position and die by your sword. This requires courage, consistency, and, most importantly, a visionary leader who stands by the company’s brand and does not weaken it to appease shareholders or political interests.