What brand loyalty? I will be the first one to admit that I feel no connection with any businesses whatsoever. Google could go out of business tomorrow, and I wouldn’t care a bit as long as its replacement is just as useful. This maybe harsh, but it’s true. We assume that people stick with a brand because they are loyal. No, people stick with certain brands because they are lazy and busy. They are lazy (and probably don’t have time) to try things that are new, unproven, and risky, but they will not hesitate to switch if the new thing suddenly becomes proven(i.e. everyone around me is using it) and more beneficial to them. Hint: these are most people, and these are NOT the audience your marketing campaigns should target. The irony is that people who aren’t lazy always seem to have ENOUGH time to try everything.
So how do you build brand loyalty? Answer: you use people(your employees) to connect with people(your customers). Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh understands this, “Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
Maybe now is the perfect time to get out of the closed doors of your meeting rooms. If your customers are already talking about you, it might not be such a bad idea to join the conversations. Transparency, whether you like it or not, is coming.
Also, I’d like to point out that it’s actually a good thing that no one has any brand loyalty today. Combine with the fact that it’s easy, cheap and fast to start any new projects today, it’s guaranteed that any mistakes you make in good intentions while trying out something new will soon be forgiven and forgotten by your customers — maybe not your boss, but certainly your customers.
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