Creating Brand Loyalty Building brand loyalty can save your organization up to 500% on new customer acquisition year after year by Shannon Carter, Cartis Group President

Why do some consumers buy the same brand over and over again despite other choices? Why do they have such a strong associative belief system for one product or service over another? The answer is easy…these brand owners consistently produce an excellent (not necessarily superior) product, provide customer-centric customer service and have invested in a professional branding process. In other words, they have committed resources to the process of building their brand and brand loyalty over time. You can do the same thing for your company and/or product armed with the following knowledge:

First of all, is brand loyalty important? Will investing resources in building loyalty have a ROI? According to a recent article in Brandweek, 76% of Americans across all demographic groups consider a product's brand before making a final product selection. Sixty-seven percent of those consumers said they would "chase the brand" to a different store if it wasn't available or do without until the next shopping excursion. In addition, the average cost for acquiring a new customer is approximately five times more than keeping an existing customer for almost all industries. Therefore, building brand loyalty can save your organization up to 500% on new customer acquisition year-after-year. Just ask Harley-Davidson if brand loyalty is important. The rabid loyalty of the Harley rider almost single-handedly kept the company alive during the 1970s. Since then, the company has built an excellent product, refined its customer service and enjoyed amazing success.

Although I don’t expect accountants to start tattooing accounting software logos on their arms, building B2B brand loyalty can have a similar effect. B2B consumers want to have a strong belief system in the companies they buy from. When we talk about brand loyalty, most people think of consumer brands. Although most of the top 100 brands are consumer brands, there are several B2B specific brands in the top 100 (Canon Office Copiers—#8) and several more B2B/B2C blended brands (Blackberry—#6 and IBM Computers—#50). These companies treat their B2B branding efforts like that of a consumer brand.

The first step in building brand loyalty is committing resources to improving your product/service. No amount of branding, advertising or marketing can overcome a poor product or bad customer service. Start the brand loyalty process with an introspective look. Invest your time in consistently developing a product or service that people desire and will use. Brand loyalty is built upon consistent products that are salient to the market. You may build the best buggy whips in the world, but do people want them…will they buy them?

On the other hand, you may have built the newest and greatest widget the world has ever seen. That widget then must be consistently produced. For example, think of McDonald’s french fries. Are they the best fries you’ve ever tasted? Maybe—maybe not, but almost everyone in the developed world has tasted them. Moreover, when I asked you to think about those fries, you pictured exactly what McDonald’s wants you to see—right down to the golden color, packaging, even the smell and taste. McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc, worked for years to consistently reproduce his french fries. He believed that people everywhere would buy his fries if he could give them a consistently good product…and he was right. It doesn’t matter if the fries are the “best,” it only matters that people enjoy them, the fries are consistently produced and people have access to them at a competitive price-point.

Superior customer service is the next key to building brand loyalty. While your product needs to be very good, your customer service needs to be superior—front to back. The sales process is usually where people concentrate their efforts, and this is a good starting point. However, every customer touch-point needs to be superior—technical support, Web site, invoicing, product returns, vendor payments (your vendors are your customers too), store appearance, parking lots, bathrooms, etc. All of these are opportunities to build your brand and brand loyalty.

Take yourself through the entire buying experience for your product: information seeking, making the purchase, after-the-sale follow-up and finally returning the product (if applicable). If you can’t do it objectively, have an employee or secret shopper go through the process and report to you. Then compare your buying experience to that of your competitor’s. I have no doubt, you will be armed with ways to improve the experience and therefore, brand value and brand loyalty.

The last step in building brand loyalty is investing in a proven branding process to build brand value. At Cartis Group, we refer to branding as the process of articulating the core business strategy through every touch-point communications while simultaneously ensuring an excellent customer experience. Brand value is built through maximizing the logical and emotional connections the target audience has with your product or service. Brand loyalty is achieved when the target audience has a stronger emotional connection to your product or service over a logical connection to a competitive product or service.

Let's assume for a moment that your product is rock-solid and your customer service is stellar. All buying decisions are controlled by a combination of logic and emotion (needs and wants). Some decisions are completely logical. Some are completely emotional. For instance, I have a very strong emotional connection with the Porsche 911. However, I have a family with small children and all the responsibilities that go along with that. Therefore, the logical side of me wins the Porsche argument, thus I drive a non-descript family sedan. My emotional side debates with my logical side now-and-then by making arguments that I need transportation…the Porsche 911 is an excellent car and has a back seat for my children, grocery shopping and such. I’ve even taken my wife on a test drive…perhaps that was the biggest mistake. This emotional and logical debate is an excellent exercise in building brand loyalty. Take yourself through a similar logical and emotional debate for your product. Have your sales staff do an emotional versus logical role-play. List out every point they bring up. Keep this list handy for the next exercise.

Imagine emotion and logic as two independent lines with inversely dependant sliders on them—like a two-line abacus. On the left of each line is “low” and on the right is “high.” Your product or service will naturally gravitate toward one of the lines (computer processors=logic, Porsche 911=emotion). List out the features and benefits of your product and categorize them as logical connectors (needs) and emotional connectors (wants). Now add the list you got from your emotional versus logical role-play. If your product naturally gravitates toward a logical argument (and almost all B2B products do), maximize every logical connector possible. If your product gravitates towards the emotional line, your goal is to make every emotional connection no matter how it affects the logical slider.

Once you maximize all the attributes that build the natural connection with your target audience, start working on the other line with arguments that won’t affect the original line. Remember, the natural response is an inverse move of the sliders so make arguments that are airtight. Be objective; don’t make arguments that your competitor can own. Try to make arguments that are specific to your product. Brand loyalty is built through maximizing the logical and emotional connectors your audience has with your product.

After exhausting all your arguments, your sliders will be in a relative position to your new branding message. Using my Porsche analogy, the emotional slide would be very close to “high” and the logical slider would be close to “low” giving them a branding message of 90% emotion and 10% logic…using me as an audience of one. You now have a brand value message base to build upon. All the supporting arguments are important and should be built into supporting messaging. Keep your top-level messaging simple and salient.

Intel is an excellent case study for building emotion into what was once a completely logical purchase. In the late 1980s, Intel’s market share was eroding to AMD’s less expensive processor line. Even though the AMD chips were based on the Intel platform, AMD was selling more chips than Intel. In 1991, Intel launched the “Intel Inside” campaign, successfully bringing an emotional attachment into a purely logical product. They treated the campaign as a process, successfully incorporating it into all their messaging. Fourteen years later, Intel continues to grow and reinforce the campaign. Today most consumers can tell you the processing speed of their computer like most car enthusiasts can tell you the size of the engine in their car (V6, V8, 4.5 liter). Intel is now one of the top ten known brands in the world largely because they were committed to maximizing their logical and emotional messaging.

Building brand loyalty takes a commitment of time and resources. The dividends for building brand loyalty far outweigh the cost associated with doing so. However, the process starts with your product/service and customer service. Once you have a flawless product and stellar customer service, you can turn your attention to logical and emotional branding. Be prepared; it is a process. Intel did not become a top ten brand in a year or even two. They had a plan, stuck to it and continue to do so. They have evolved their brand, but remain true to the essence of what they started in 1991. Perhaps you don’t want or need to be a top ten brand, but building brand loyalty will help you maximize your company’s potential and minimize your sales and marketing expenses.

For more information on building your brand, please call Cartis Group at 800-479-2616 or visit us at www.cartisgroup.com.