Hello to my readers and thank you for following,
This time I wanted to look at a theme called 'loyalty'. What does loyalty stand for in English?! According to dictionary.com loyalty as a noun, plural is:
1.The state or quality of being loyal; faithfulness to commitments or obligations
2. Faithful adherence to a sovereign, government, leader, cause, etc.
Loyalty, allegiance, fidelity all imply sense of duty or of devoted attachment to something or someone. Loyalty connotes sentiment and the feeling of devotion that one holds for one's country, creed, family, friends, etc. I would mark the two words – devoted attachment. If we are looking at the previous blog post which was about branding, one of the keys of successful brand is positive customer experience with the brand. Customers will become loyal to a brand if their previous experience has been positive. Customer loyalty encourages people to shop more often therefore spend more money. With the positive experience customers spread the word and might potentially encourage other people to brand switch.
There are two types of brand loyalty – Monogamous and Polygamous loyalty. Lets take a deeper look in these terms. Monogamous loyalty: for example a person shops in Asda, Farmfoods and Savers unfailingly shop at all three. The person who shops in these 3 shops is then loyal to them but not to others and yet 100% loyal to none. A customer could purchase brand 'A' 70% of a time, brand 'B' 20% of the time and Brand 'C' 10% of time. In the real life to find 100% loyal customer is hard. The studies show that in majority of cases to make customers completely loyal is unrealistic. Polygamous loyalty is a better description of actual consumer behavior than either brand switching or promiscuity. Many researches think that a definition of loyalty is a summary of history of actions, feelings and intentions towards the brand or commercial relationship.
Now, this makes me think, is there no 100% loyalty to a brand? But how about the "I'' geeks, who will stand in a 12h que for a brand new IPhone, what about Xbox or PlayStation fans? I am sure that you have at least two friends who are either Xbox or PlayStation fans and they will never brand switch but what makes them stay with the brands if even the technologies are at the same level, even the pricing for games are at the same level. I do understand for example loyalty towards food shops, personally I would shop at a store which is affordable and close to my location. Sainsbury's is not my favorite store but I shop there the most because I live 2 minutes away from the store, I would rather shop at Asda but it is too far away and I do not have a car. Speaking about cars, my family is loyal to Audi car brand, from my Grandpa to my sister and if I would need to chose one I would go for Audi as well. My explanation is simple, I have grown up with this brand and my family haven't said anything bad about it, so my experience (without even driving the car) has been positive and the influence of my family plays a big role in my decisions – their opinion is important. You could ask yourself few questions as well, are you a loyal customer, to what brands and why?! This post is just an insight of the term 'loyalty', further instigations will show more in depth detail.
I will be carrying out an Investigation on loyalty by making a market research. In the next blog posts you will able to see the results of the investigation. If you are interested to take a part in the investigation you can get in touch with me to discuss details.
Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day!
Justine
Resources:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/loyalty
http://prloyaltymarketing.com/customer-loyalty/what-is-customer-loyalty/
