How do you develop a marketing program that attracts loyal customers?
Here are five tips to get your brand team thinking:
Browsing Category
Marketing
All major brands try to get their customers to be loyal to their brands. This should be called brand loyalty.
Cult Brands focus on being loyal to their customers. This should be distinguished as customer loyalty.
Why is loyalty so high among customers of Cult Brands? A simple but elegant explanation is that modern humans join communities by making purchases. That’s the big secret behind Cult Brands: they give their customers the sense that they belong; their brand’s values become part of their own identity.
The purpose of business—creating a customer—and your customers—at a human level—aren’t changing.
But for many businesses, it’s time to make a change toward having a deep understanding of their true purpose and their customers.
Is the goal of your business to fulfill needs in your customers’ lives or is it merely to “sell more stuff to more people more often for more money more efficiently?”1
If the latter is your main goal, you should probably stop reading and go share a New Coke with Sergio Zyman.
The primary ingredient behind compelling stories come down to one thing: problems.
The protagonist faces a challenge and tries to overcome it. This is the essence of drama and the key to good storytelling.
Without problems—without troubles and tensions—there’s no story. There’s nothing to engage us.
The reason our stories, messaging and marketing fall flat is that the people we want to serve are not motivated by our need to be seen, to be heard or to close a sale. People—your audience, customers and clients—are motivated by their need to be seen, heard and understood.
Bernadette Jiwa, The Right Story
Despite the amount of money companies spend on customer insights, most companies don’t value true insights.
Insights should tell you something new; they should change the way you think. Yet, most companies reward predictable results instead of game changers.1
On average, companies value “insights” that confirm what they’re already doing. At best, they want “insights” that only slightly modify what they’re already doing.
Cult Branding was founded on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Maslow’s hierarchy offers a simple framework for understanding customer behavior: humans have inherent needs that they try to fulfill—consciously or unconsciously—in everything they do.
Although Maslow’s hierarchy offers significant explanatory power, it does not provide a complete explanation of brand loyalty. A more complete explanation involves taking a step back from Maslow and understanding how humans react when something happens to them.