brand loyalty Archives | Ping! >> Loyalty Science in Practice

The Loyalty Puzzle: What Loyalty Research Needs to Answer Now

Posted on April 19, 2020April 19, 2020

In the last couple of months, I have been super busy starting a new exciting research initiative, the Loyalty Science Lab. Housed at my university, the Lab’s mission is to create and promote cutting-edge scientific research on brand and customer loyalty. Through collaborative efforts between marketing practitioners and academic researchers from multiple disciplines and multiple industries, the Loyalty Science Lab identifies high-priority loyalty-related issues, engages in deep, evidence-based scientific research on these issues, and disseminates the insight to benefit loyalty research and practice. I am happy to say that the Loyalty Science Lab is now up and running!

As its first major initiative, the Loyalty Science Lab spoke with a group of leading marketing practitioners and academics. The purpose of the conversations was to identify important loyalty-related issues that need deep, focused research. The questions generated through this process were further narrowed down by the experts on our advisory board into a list of top-tier and second-tier questions.

In this article, I would like to share with you the major loyalty issues we’ve identified that need more research at this time. For a complete list of the research questions, you can download The Loyalty Puzzle 2020–2022 edition.

How to Build Customer Habits Through Customer Relationship Management Part 3

Posted on May 23, 2018July 12, 2018

Welcome to the third and final part of this series on how to build and leverage customer habits throughout the customer journey. In Part 1 and Part 2, I shared with you the differentiation between a habit shaping window and a habit maintenance and transformation phase in a customer’s lifetime with the business and how habit disruption can serve as a beacon for possible customer defection. Today I would like to talk a little about what you should know about loyalty and habit in the customer expansion phase. Oftentimes your business may not be content with just retaining your existing customers. Your ambition may be to grow your existing customers’ relationship with you by getting them to buy more, upgrade, or buy other product lines that you also offer. To do this successfully, you need to understand what drives your customer and know if your customer loves you or they are simply habitual or both.

Segment Customers by Attitudinal Loyalty and Habit

Before implementing a customer expansion (cross-selling or up-selling) campaign, it is important to know where your customers are in the two-dimensional space of loyalty and habit. By loyalty, I don’t mean just behavioral loyalty such as buying a lot, because habitual customers may look exactly like that too. Instead, I refer to loyalty in the sense of how consumers feel about your brand. The attitudinally loyal customers are ones that love your brand, believe in the quality of your product, and prefer you over competitive products when asked. Because attitudinally loyal and strongly habitual customers are both likely to buy a lot from you, they may look very similar in their behavior in terms of how frequently they purchase or how much they spend. You have to dig a little deeper into their behavior to identify which is which. The key difference is that habitual customers tend to demonstrate a certain level of consistency and stability in what they do. They may buy around the same time, from the same location, repeatedly buy the same product, almost always (or never) use coupon, etc. The ones who are attitudinally loyal but NOT habitual will also buy a lot, but you won’t see the same stable behavioral pattern. The table below will help you make a determination based on what your customers do. If you are interested in a more nerdy academic dive into the differences, check out my published paper Not All Repeat Customers Are the Same.

	True Loyalty	Habit
*What drives behavior?*	Belief about product superiority and/or emotional connection	The presence of contextual cues (e.g., eat cookie -> want milk)
*Awareness*	Conscious decision	Automatic process with no clear decision-making process
*Purchase pattern*	Erratic as need arises	Consistent in terms of time, location, and context (see more below)
*Reaction to competitive offerings*	Aware of competitive offerings but relatively resistant due to loyalty	Blind to competitive offerings
*Deal breakers*	Dissatisfaction, product quality issues, service failure, etc.	Change of contextual cues, such as store layout redesign, location change, etc.

Before I move on, I would like to add that habit is easier to observe through behavior than attitudinal loyalty, as habit has a certain pattern to it. To accurately gauge attitudinal loyalty, it would be best to survey your customers and ask about their thoughts and feelings about your product. But if that is not possible, the table above combined with customer purchase data should still help you separate those frequent customers who are driven by habit vs. not habit (e.g., loyalty). Customers’ social media conversations with you can also give you some clues as to how loyal they are to your brand. Continue reading “How to Build Customer Habits Through Customer Relationship Management Part 3”

Loyalty According to Tweeple

Posted on August 19, 2010

A while ago, I created a search column in Tweetdeck to see what people have to say about loyalty on Twitter. To my surprise, once the column was created, tweets just started flying in. There has been rarely a day when I do not see at least a few hundred public tweets containing the word “loyalty”. Apparently, loyalty is on people’s mind often. Out of curiosity, I started to dig a little deeper and more systematically into what is being said about loyalty in these tweets. While I’m not quite done with my analysis yet, here I’d like to share some of my initial discoveries.

What/Whom Are People Loyal to?

When we talk about loyalty, we usually imply an object or person that we are loyal to. From the tweets that I have analyzed, here are the most often objects of loyal passion:

A romantic relationship or partners in the romantic relationship
Friends and family
Sports team
Brands/products
Co-workers/boss
Dogs’ loyalty to their owners (such as this touching story from Wikipedia about this Hachiko dog)

Interestingly, when specific brands or products were mentioned as objects of loyalty, mobile products such as cellphones and mobile providers were the most frequently referred-to product category. For instance, earlier today, there were a few retweets of the message by @Natemz below.

In this case, the tweet is actually a counter-loyalty message, where product features beat loyalty. But it still implies loyalty that some people used to have for BlackBerry before they switched to Android. Continue reading “Loyalty According to Tweeple”