How to Build Loyalty for Brands, According to Behavioral Science

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Loyalty for brands is the holy grail: every brand wants to have the reputation, perception and affinity from consumers like they feel toward household names like Apple and Nike. For those brands, there is a deep emotional link with their customers – to the point where they’ll always turn to those brands first, regardless of better prices or new offerings from competitors.
Building that kind of relationship with customers – where your brand captures more share of life and is the first one that comes to mind when they think of a specific category or product – is critical to sustainable growth and success for your bottom line.
Yet many business leaders think that building loyalty for brands can be manufactured with offers and coupons, branded apps and exclusive deals. While those tactics can be important to a brand loyalty program, grounding your strategy in behavioral science is essential to earning that holy grail of loyalty.

 

 

Why Consumer Brand Loyalty is Important

When done right, brand loyalty is a sustainable revenue engine – research from the Harvard Business Review suggests that “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by at least 25% and up to 95%.” Name a brand that wouldn’t want that kind of exponential ROI.
To unlock the benefits of brand loyalty, brands must put in the work of building a personalized emotional connection on a human level with their customers. Over time, they’ll reap the rewards.
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The Three Hallmarks of Consumer Brand Loyalty

Building an emotional connection with your customers is easier said than done, but it can be broken down into three component parts that must be a part of your brand perception as the foundation for fostering loyalty.
  1. Quality – First and foremost, your products and services need to be high-quality. If they’re not exceeding expectations and consistently delighting your customers, nothing else will matter – they’ll stop engaging with your brand and switch to your competitors.
  2. Trust – Your customers need to have faith that their perception of your brand aligns with what they can expect when they engage with your brand. This comes from being consistent in every moment and across every touchpoint – digital, in-person, before the purchase, after the purchase and over the lifetime of the customer relationship.
  3. Advocacy – When your customers are confident in your consistency and are delighted by their experiences with your brand, they’ll share their enthusiasm with others – the ultimate end-goal of building consumer brand loyalty.

 

A Behavioral Science Approach to Fostering Loyalty for Brands

If you want to build a path to consumer brand loyalty, your customers need to see themselves and their needs reflected in the brand – and that comes from creating habits, where they automatically default to your brand regardless of the other options available.
Habits take time and repetition to take hold, and that comes from being both relevant and convenient. When a consumer experiences a relevant emotional cue or trigger – like wanting to order take-out for dinner, for example, if you’re a food brand – you need to “deliver the goods” so consistently, easily and well that, over time, the customer will intuitively return again and again whenever they have that feeling.
It’s not only important to create value in these practical ways for your customers, but also to live out your brand values – be true to who you are, what you do, what you stand for and the standards by which you hold your brand. When you consistently embody your values, your customers will be able to feel an affinity, trust and loyalty for your brand, and the relationship will grow stronger and more profitable.
Another way to build and strengthen that relationship is to listen to your customers – invite their feedback and take meaningful and visible action in response. When customers see your brand receive and act upon their input, it will show 1) how much you value them and the relationship with them, and 2) feel more ownership of and affinity toward the brand – and they’ll be more loyal customers as a result.

 

 

Brand Loyalty Management as Risk Mitigation

Brand loyalty management – the way brands retain customers and engage and nurture them into brand advocates – is a long-term investment a brand can make to protect itself in the midst of market changes and cultural shifts.
There are inevitable fluctuations and cyclical shocks in the market that can break a brand’s best-laid plans. But there are also more predictable risks that brands take, like expanding into a new category, releasing a new line of products or services or making substantial overhauls to their branding and/or marketing efforts. All these disruptions have the potential to threaten the bottom line.
Having a community of consistently loyal customers can be a strong bulwark against these risks because their emotional connections will increase their likelihood of sticking with your brand – even in turbulent times. Investing in fostering consumer brand loyalty now can give you more ballast and flexibility either to grow and expand or to weather the storms that may come.
It’s an investment both in the now and in the future.

 

 

Build Customer Relationships with Consumer Behavior Insights

True customer centricity demands a deep human understanding of the human factors behind consumer decision-making. Material’s team of behavioral scientists has decades of experience decoding the intricacies of human behavior, unlocking insights that help the world’s leading brands take their customer relationships from transactional to transformational.
Want to learn more about how Material can help your brand earn customer loyalty by tapping into human behavior? Start the conversation today.

 

 

FAQs

How should brands reward loyal customers?
It’s not enough to provide only explicit rewards – like exclusive offers, “do X and get Y.” Brands also must deliver implicit rewards by delivering signature moments that elevate the overall customer experience. They need to be nuanced, unique to each brand and growing in value, but they go above and beyond in strengthening the relationship with your customers.

 

How is brand loyalty lost?
Just like the old adage about trust, loyalty for brands can “take a long time to build but only a moment to lose.” A singular experience of falling short of fulfilling your brand promise in a touchpoint with a consumer can tarnish their perception of your brand and undermine an otherwise perfect record.
Another way to lose consumer brand loyalty is by falling behind on current trends and no longer being relevant to your customers to the point where they feel indifferent toward you – and begin looking elsewhere to meet their needs and preferences.