Are customers loyal to brands despite dramatically changed market landscape and significantly lowered consumer purchasing power? Can brands yet rule the world?
Whatever reservations you may have – with or without conclusion, customer brand loyalty is still looked upon as the Holy Grail in customer relationship thus marketing success despite the pandemic. We want loyal customers as they don’t have a strong connection with our company and buy more, sometimes even willing to pay a premium, but also because they are prone to become true brand advocates.
That’s the theory. But how loyal are customers really in the current market environment? And can you even be loyal to a brand or business? After all, the word loyalty implies a sense of faithfulness, dedication, passionate belief, adherence, trust, commitment, conviction, a lot of emotion, allegiance and/or even devotion.
Can we be or have loyal customers in that sense? And what about the fact that customer loyalty has been clearly on the decline due to very poor economic sentiments, certainly among the so-called digital customers – those that tend to use digital platforms and tools most as we will cover further in this overview?
In the rush of business necessity and the desire to meet quarterly financial requirements, branding has become less about solving specific needs in a sustainable manner – and more an attempt to quickly create new revenue streams by promoting solutions for needs that do exist or don’t exist. This is bound to fail because it doesn’t support lasting and meaningful engagement. It’s “moment marketing” – and it will not allow you to become part of your consumers’ reality and experiences.”
Moment marketing
‘Moment marketing’ does little to develop a brand or give consumers permission to interact with them. Brands must have purpose by producing goods and services that improve the lives of consumers and enhance quality of life.
With today’s savvy consumer, it’s imperative that brands focus on how to better interact with them, how to build stronger relationships, and how to ensure that those relationships generate trust and meaningful engagement over time.
Covid-19 has made some industries redundant, some much smaller in demand but at the same time expanded several other industries such as telecommunication.
When markets decline, one big way to retain gross profits is to maximise margins for which brand equity building would continue to be the only way.
Opposing view
Consumers are no longer brand loyal. They may be loyal to the engagement experience that a particular brand offers. Once the experiential elements of brand engagement disappear, in many cases, so does the emotional connection consumers have with the brand that was providing them that experience.
We live in an experience-driven world. Consumers gravitate toward those experiences that provide them with the stimulation they are looking for. People have become sensitive about how they spend their time and what inspires them to do so. If a brand focuses more on trying to sell consumers their products/services rather than finding ways to creatively engage with them and solve a need, their brand will be short-lived.
You don’t have to look much further than your own family to know that this is true. This is a lesson we have learned during the pandemic.
Consumers today are having difficulty trusting a brand’s intentions. They want to know what a brand stands for and what they value and they want that brand to live it every day – in everything they do and how they do it.
If a brand stands for quality, a consumer expects it at all times. When brands begin to cut-corners, quality suffers and it is reflected in how a product tastes, smells, feels – and this is when the consumer begins to feel slighted.
Based on the experience during the past two years of the pandemic-ridden world, the current environment offers an unprecedented opportunity for these smaller companies to compete against their more established rivals for exposure, mindshare, product trials, and market share with a new and broader base of potential customers.
In this article, we share the findings of our research into what percentage of consumer purchases are vulnerable to substitution and the ways brands can rethink their value propositions to customers in uncertain times.
Act fast and create the future today.