10 Strategies for Creating a Magnetic Brand that Attracts Loyal Customers

Brand loyalty doesn’t happen by accident. Brands that cultivate loyalty find ways to emotionally connect with their customers; these brands stand for something meaningful in their customers’ eyes.

How do you create and establish a successful brand that brings loyal, profitable customers to your door?

1) Build your business around your best customers instead of trying to aimlessly drive sales. Over time, your return on marketing and innovation efforts will rise. Apple is masterful at creating products especially for customers who love style, creativity, and simplicity.

2) Listen to what your best customers are telling you. Don’t be a transaction-making machine. Be a real person and build a business to serve real people. This is the key to cultivating customer loyalty. Southwest Airlines isn’t just another airline to its loyal customers who perceive Southwest as the “heart of the sky.”

3) Focus on what your brand does best. If you try to be all things to all people you’ll end up being nothing to everyone. Be bold. Be unique. Differentiate your brand around your strengths. Ritz Carlton is a hotel of ladies and gentleman serving ladies and gentleman. Volkswagen Beetle has built a distinctive brand around a special little car.

4) Understand what makes your customers tick. Learn how they think, feel, and behave towards your brand. This isn’t easy, but if you can decode these drivers, you’ll be better positioned to create long-term customers. Talk to your customers. Read their comments about you and your products on the web. Read blog posts related to your brand. Most of all, truly listen to what your customers are saying.

5) Identify your customers’ drivers of choice. Why are your current customers buying from you instead of your competitors? Knowing the answer to this question can define the future of your enterprise. Understanding drivers of choice isn’t easy because you need to decode the conscious and unconscious motivators influencing your customers’ buying decisions.

6) Be relentless in serving your best customers better than anyone else. Give them plenty of reasons to stay with you and no reasons to leave. Push your business to continually find ways to make your customers’ lives easier and better. Brands like Amazon.com and Netflix are constantly finding ways to enhance the customer experience by refining algorithms to recommend products and movies the customer will enjoy.

7) Find ways to wow and surprise your best customers. Do something extraordinary and unexpected for them. Instead of playing with “word-of-mouth marketing” programs, focus on better serving your customers and word of mouth will happen naturally. Online retailer Zappos is masterful at producing the wow factor by providing free, surprise upgrades to overnight delivery, random gifts, and hand-written notes to their customers.

8) Determine what your brand stands for and deliver on your promise. You must become relentless in your dedication to deliver on your brand promise each and every day. Harley-Davidson customers love the freedom of the open road and the brand promises that freedom. Oprah stands for empowerment, hope, and the promise of a better tomorrow.

9) Build a brand model that identifies the psychological motivators, key characteristics, and emotional connections your customers have with you. An effective brand model will describe your customers’ mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors toward your brand. Every successful brand has some form of a brand model. Major brands go through formal processes to construct their brand models.

10) Use your brand model to make all business decisions. An effective brand model accurately predicts customer behavior because the model takes into account the psychological drivers of your customers. If your new ad doesn’t hit on what’s important to your customers, don’t run it. If you’re innovating in a direction that isn’t relevant to your brand lovers, change directions. An effective brand model removes the guesswork in building a magnetic brand that attracts more loyal customers.

Most businesses struggle because they don’t identify whom their business is especially for. Market research and focus groups don’t provide the answers because ninety percent of consumer behavior is unconscious. Customers rarely articulate their true motivations even when directly questioned—people simply cannot describe why they really do what they do. Your job as an entrepreneur, brand manager or chief marketing executive is to figure out what motivates your best customers. You need psychological insights into the motivations behind your customers’ behaviors—how they think and feel about your brand. These consumer insights will provide the business lens needed to evaluate marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and product innovations.

Where to go from here
March 22, 2012 by

Do you know why customers buy from you?

Why spend millions on research that doesn’t help grow your business?

Market research provides the wrong answers to the right questions. Over 90% of customer behavior is unconscious. Customers rarely articulate their true motivations even when directly questioned—people simply cannot describe why they really do what they do.

From our experience, the majority of market research and customer focus groups become irrelevant once you figure out what motivates your best customers.

Predicting customer Behavior

Most successful brands understand the value of a brand model: To predict customer behavior.

The Brand Lover Model® provides the right answers to the questions that drive growth.

Our unique approach to brand modeling provides accurate predictions of customer behavior. BLM unlocks customer loyalty and helps you attract profitable customers who create new customers for you through word of mouth.

BLM gives you the psychological insights into the motivations behind your customer’s behavior—how they think and feel about your brand. The Model uses humanistic psychology, archetypal imagery and cultural mythology to identify the patterns your best customers share.

We employ in-depth customer interviews with your best customers, customized psychological assessments, market surveys, and quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Why Build a Brand Model

But how we get to the answers isn’t as important as the answers themselves. Your completed Brand Lover Model offers insights you can use right away:

  • Drivers of Choice: Why your best customers buy from you instead of your competitors. BLM uncovers the conscious and unconscious psychological motivators driving your customer’s relationship with your brand.
  • Drivers of Differentiation: What makes your brand stand out in the eyes of your customers. BLM tells you how to differentiate and be chosen more often than your competitors.

Brand Lover Model® 2.0 provides critical customer insights that can help you better evaluate marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and product innovations.

Marketing executives often make up what they want to hear. The Brand Lover Model helps you determine if what you’re doing is actually working. Instead of going exclusively with gut emotions—or with just doing what you’ve always done—our effective model can more accurately tell you what’s really going on with your business, with your customers, and in your industry.

Hire the leaders in Branding Research

Many consulting research firms and advertising agencies are trying to mimic what we do, but this process isn’t just about interviews, polls, and statistics.

Led by Cult Branding expert BJ Bueno, our team of thought leaders, brand strategists, psychologists, writers, biologists, photographers, technologists, and business philosophers brings fresh perspective to our creative process. To predict customer behavior and create your Brand Lover Model®, we combine analytical prowess with intuitive finesse.

Our clients include Kohl’s Department Stores, Turner Classic Movies, Scheels, Thomas Nelson Publishers and LA Lakers.

After completing our Brand Lover Model and learning who our best customers are, BJ Bueno and his team helped us construct an entirely new, innovative merchandising system based on the needs of the customer. Sales rose 26% over the previous year after book retailers installed the new system.
— Wayne Hastings, Sr. Vice President at Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Let us help you build a powerful Brand Lover Model® for your business. Review our frequently asked questions or fill out the form below for more information.

Ready to create your ultimate marketing plan?

Let’s get the conversation started >>

 

March 22, 2012 by

What is Cult Branding?

Brands fail for one primary reason: instead of building a brand some people love, companies build brands no one hates.

Most marketers live in a world where they are constantly searching for the flashy, the instant—in short, the trivial.

We must recognize that brands don’t belong to marketers. Brands belong to the customer. The customer’s embrace is the only vote that counts, yet it is constantly ignored by strategies that place our products and services as the “goal” rather than the means to satisfy our customer’s needs, wishes, and fantasies.

Successful brands embrace their customers by anticipating basic and spiritual human needs.

Success creates magnetic brands—Cult Brands.

Why Cult Branding Works

Cult Brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are a living, breathing surrogate family filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products and services. Picture a Cult Brand in this context, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why these brands all have such high customer loyalty and devoted followers.

That’s how Cult Branding works.

Society only helps to accelerate the drivers behind its success.

March 19, 2012 by

Ace Hardware: Putting Customers First in a Quest to Double Market Share

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Normally, when we talk about watching paint dry, we’re referring to something tedious or boring. But for the leadership at Ace Hardware, paint is pretty exciting.  According to this New York Times article, a new product line (coupled with an insightful marketing approach) may be what it takes to allow the 4,300+ hardware and home improvement store chain to double their share of the domestic paint market.

Brand Modeling and the Search for a New Growth Strategy

Dominant organizations are engaged in a continual search for growth opportunities. What are the best ways to increase market share, raise a brand’s visibility, and connect more effectively with their customers? Many companies, particularly those in the gaming sector, are targeting international markets by adapting to local preferences. For instance, identifying the beste online casino for norske spillere has become essential for casinos aiming to attract Norwegian players, as catering to specific preferences and regulations can significantly boost engagement. While it’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies will succeed, especially in a competitive landscape.

Which brings us to Ace Hardware.  This well-established brand has numerous options available to it. Ace Hardware has the resources and ability to pursue growth in any of several directions.  We think that Ace’s leadership team has made a smart decision by focusing on the paint portion of their business. Their approach shows that there’s been a concerted effort to understand and better serve their customer.

Know Your Customer To Build Your Brand

What is the power of paint? Some analysts have compared painting the house to the famous lipstick effect—a quick and affordable way to lift the spirits when it’s not economically feasible to make larger, more indulgent purchases.  Ace Hardware’s customers may not be in a position to renovate the entire kitchen or do over the bathroom. Yet they’re still driven by the need to make positive changes in their environment.

Painting a room delivers a powerful visual and emotional impact for a relatively small financial investment. Ace is demonstrating superior customer knowledge by providing a way to fill a significant emotional need while being sensitive to the current economic tensions and challenges their customer base is facing.

At the same time, Ace has used a very gender-specific, romance-oriented approach to marketing their new line of paint. Color choices are overwhelmingly made by women, according to Dana Larsen, an Ace Brand manager. The new campaign is based around the need for strong, satisfying, loving relationships—finding the perfect shade, color, or hue is referred to as finding your “soul paint.”

This recognizes and capitalizes on the biological driver that urges us to form lasting bonds. Couple it with some visual humor (after all, there’s something inherently funny about a line-up of 8 purple people) and you have a message that appeals to Ace’s customers on a number of levels.

Will Ace be able to meet their goal of doubling their market share by 2015? Appealing to their customers through multiple psychologically-appealing channels is not a bad start.  Understanding the tensions and pressures facing their customer base, providing an economical means to satisfying compelling emotional needs, and honoring the underlying unconscious drivers of customer behavior are all steps dominant organizations use when they want to grow.  That’s the value of putting customers first.

March 19, 2012 by

How to Create a Brand

Business leaders instinctively know that customer loyalty is important, but many feel it is a fruitless endeavor to try to truly win the hearts and minds of their customers. Instead, the “merchant mind” takes over and the focus becomes on the next transaction instead of building a long-term relationship with your customer.

When executives first hear about the notion of building a Cult Brand, they often wonder, “Can we really do it? Can our brand achieve “cult” status? And if so, what would that look like?”

The answer, of course, is, “Yes, you can.” To see what a Cult Brand looks like, watch this brief video of an IKEA store grand opening.

 


 

How does IKEA do it?

Knowingly or not, they follow the Seven Rules of Cult Brands.

March 19, 2012 by