BRAND LOVE How to turn customers into loyal brand advocates

Inspired by the following research on brand loyalty: Erciş, A., Ünal, S., Candan, F. B., & Yıldırım, H. (2012). The effect of brand satisfaction, trust and brand commitment on loyalty and repurchase intentions. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 58, 1395-1404.

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Building brand love. How do you turn a customer into a loyal brand advocate?

Getting people to buy a product or service once is hard enough, and creating loyal, repeat-customers can be even more challenging. The thing most of my clients really want to know is how do I find loyal customers who not only come back for more, but tell everyone they know to come too? The short answer: You don’t find brand loyalists. You create them by building brand love.

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Thankfully, building brand love follows a somewhat predictable process. Yes, it takes work on the part of the brand, and most brands tend to skip one or more steps in the process. But, if building brand loyalty were easy, everyone would do it! And since so many brands are not willing to do what it takes to endear themselves to consumers, those that are willing to invest in brand love, will see it returned in increased revenue, consistent sales, and more successful marketing initiatives. In other words, building brand loyalty results in greater ROI all around.

Brand love → Greater ROI

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So, what do we mean by brand love? Brand love is similar to brand loyalty, but it’s not the same thing. There are different degrees and types of brand loyalty. For example, your consumers can be fully loyal or have divided loyalty, and that loyalty can be affective or continuance loyalty. Affective loyalty is based strong emotional attachments. It occurs when consumers feel a personal affinity for the brand and are not interested in alternative brands. Continuance loyalty, on the other hand, can occur based on non-emotional factors like convenience or price. This type of brand loyalty is weaker and more easily swayed by other brands So, the holy grail of brand loyalty is brand love, which means achieving full and affective loyalty from your consumers. This requires creating consumers who LOVE your brand and ONLY your brand. This is the type of consumer who will become your brand advocate.

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How do I build brand love? (The Theory) First and foremost, you want your customers to be attached to your brand (and only your brand) based on strong, positive feelings, not convenience or price. This doesn’t mean that rational factors like convenience and price don’t play a role. They most certainly do. But, while certain rational factors may be necessary conditions for creating brand loyalty, they are not enough to achieve brand love. Consumers base feelings of loyalty on levels of brand satisfaction and brand trust. Brand satisfaction is the attitude a consumer develops after evaluating her experience with a product. High brand satisfaction is a necessary ingredient when building brand loyalty, but a satisfied customer does not always mean a loyal customer.

In addition to being satisfied with a brand, the consumer must also have brand trust. This means, they must strongly believe that the brand will fulfill their expectations. Both brand satisfaction and brand trust are affected by the consumer’s perceptions of brand value, brand quality, and brand equity. • Perceived Brand Value: The consumer’s perception of the brand when evaluating the cost of a product or service in relation to the advantage it has over other, similar products. • Perceived Brand Quality: The consumer’s perception of how well the product or service conforms to their expectations. • Perceived Equity: The value a consumer places on a product based on everything she knows, thinks and feels about the brand.

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The Brand Love Matrix: Brand loyalty requires high perceptions of value, quality and equity in order to build brand satisfaction and trust. If all these criteria are met, a brand has a good chance of fostering a repurchase intention (through continuance loyalty), which sets the stage for building affective loyalty or brand love.

Perceived Value

Brand Satisfaction

Affective Commitment

Brand Trust

Continuance Commitment

Repurchase Intention

Perceived Quality

Perceived Equity

Brand Love Advocacy & Loyalty Intention

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No, but really, how do I build brand love? (In Practice) Brand advocacy is the product of affective loyalty, which occurs when all of the previously mentioned criteria are combined with an effective marketing plan that helps communicate the brand message and solidify the consumer’s commitment to the brand. One way to achieve this is to work with a branding expert, but here are a few of the steps we use to help guide our clients through this process: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Assess value, quality, and equity. Build satisfaction and trust. Understand your brand identity. Identify a brand feeling. Communicate that feeling. Encourage commitment.

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Let’s break that down… Assessing value, quality, and equity. First you’ll need to do some research to determine how consumers perceive your product or service in terms of value, quality and equity. If you can afford a professional research consultant, great! If not, you could hold your own focus groups, send out surveys to your contact list, or analyze reviews and social media. The more data the better! As you go through your data, remember, you are assessing consumer perceptions of your product, not your own. Chances are, you’ll find areas where their perceptions do not match yours. These are your areas of opportunity!

Building satisfaction and trust. Addressing the issues uncovered by your assessment may require making improvements to your product, changing internal processes, or responding differently to consumer issues. Whatever you find out, you’ll want to develop a strategy for increasing your perceived brand value, quality, and equity, with the further goal of increasing overall brand satisfaction and trust. Keep in mind that building trust takes time.

Understanding your brand identity. Through the steps above, you’ll begin to identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. In some cases, weaknesses can become strengths. For instance, if a product is priced high and the advantages are not clear, this can cause low value perceptions, lowering both satisfaction and trust. Sometimes, communicating the advantages more clearly to the right audience can set that brand apart as a “prestige” or “luxury” brand. Identifying strengths is the key to building a strong identity.

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Identifying a brand feeling or feelings. Remember, affective loyalty requires consumers to develop strong emotional attachments to your brand. Brands that are too sterile and too focused on communicating features will have a tough time gaining brand love. Instead of thinking about the features of your product, think about what makes it unique and how that impacts the consumer’s life. It’s the difference between selling a “self-wringing mop” and selling the person and story behind it.

Communicating your brand feeling. Once you understand your brand identity and have identified your brand feeling, make sure that everything you produce for your brand communicates that feeling. This may mean refreshing the look and feel of your logo or website, creating or revising your tagline, or reevaluating your packaging or content. It also means taking care to ensure that you have a strategy in place for communicating with and responding to your consumers.

Encouraging commitment. Even if you go through all of the steps we’ve outlined here, you won’t have true brand love without commitment from your consumers. It’s not just commitment to repurchase, but emotional commitment and advocacy as well. The best way to encourage commitment is to demonstrate it. Responsiveness, unexpected rewards, and willingness to resolve issues quickly and fairly are just a few ways you can begin to prove commitment.

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Satisfaction + Trust + Affective Loyalty = Brand Love

Brand Love

Brand loyalty

Common People United knows how to build digital love. When it comes to digital, relationship marketing is just about the only type of marketing worth doing. It sacrifices the "quick sell" for the ongoing relationship. It whispers instead of shouts. It doesn’t interrupt and doesn’t annoy. In short, it values the audience as much as the brand. It can be a bit counterintuitive, but in an age where consumers have the ability to instantly research brands and find reviews, to fast-forward through commercials, skip YouTube pre-roll, and block display ads, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

Brand Trust & Satisfaction

If you’d like to know how we can help you build brand love, please contact us at [email protected] to schedule a free consultation.