Every company wants to enlist brand loyalists. These brand fanatics are the ones who carry the message to the market that your product is the best thing since night baseball, and they give you word-of-mouth credibility that money can’t buy. Why do customers keep coming back to Trader Joe’s or build a relationship to the Apple iPod or Mac? What does it take to build brand champions and continue to grow a brand? There really are some very simple keys to doing this and sometimes these are lost on marketers who try to sell stuff as opposed to understand what their customers want.
How do you enlist recruits for your army of brand loyalists? Here are a few thoughts:
1) Understand your customer’s experience. Building loyalty is about really understanding the motivations of your customer. How they think. How they use your product. Or most importantly, the experience they have with your product which is the brand. Each time someone drinks a Coke they are only drinking carbonated sugar water with caramel coloring and a certain flavor. But the real experience is in knowing that it’s a Coke with that symbolic recognition of the brand in the bottle and the logo. What customers experience and how they identify with getting what they want builds positive connections to the brand.
2) Be authentic and deliver on your brand promise. You can’t build a brand that’s fake and expect people to be loyal, especially nowadays with social media giving the customer a louder voice. Customers expect products, and brands, to be what they say they are. Authentic delivery of a quality product has built Clif Bar to be one of the leading nutritional bars on the market. Their brand commitment to the environment and to providing a quality product permeates through the whole company and its product line. They care, and that translates into customer loyalty. On the other hand, do you think anyone really believes that you “Fly the Friendly Skies” with United? There is a complete disconnection between brand experience and authenticity.
3) Listen, listen, listen harder. Care about how customers do things. Pay attention to what they say and what their experience is, and then respond to it. This ingrains in customers the sense of getting what they want not what the company wants to sell. Each new iteration of the product becomes something based on how customers interact and use those products. They have experiences in the stores and the outcome each time they buy. This reinforces loving the brand. At the end of the day, the user experience is everything.
4) Be what’s next. When brands really listen to customers it drives product development and creates what customers end up loving. Apple stopped defining itself as a computer company back in 2001 and really has focused on delivering an integrated media experience to customers through its products and platforms. They realized what people were doing is merging media through all kinds of devices. This spawned the creation of the original iPod. This device connects you to your music from your computer to your iPod. This is all about creating a personal experience for the customer through the Apple brand. How can the customer not love you?
So do you have what it takes to enlist your own army of brand followers? Take a look at how you interact with your customers and ask yourself if you are worthy of their loyalty.