If you’re familiar with the tenets of Cult Branding, you’ve heard us talk about the importance of your Brand Lovers. Your Brand Lovers are the most valuable customers you’ve got—they shop with you more often than any of your other customers, they buy more per transaction than any of your other customers, and they tell their family and friends how awesome your business is more than any of your other customers.
Understanding who your Brand Lovers are, what unconscious psychological factors motivate their purchasing decisions, and providing them with the best possible service based upon that understanding is the best, most effective way to achieve Cult Brand status—that enviable place in the marketplace where you enjoy maximum profitability and competition is irrelevant.
The more Brand Lovers you have, the healthier and more robust your organization will be. Understandably, smart companies go to extraordinary lengths to retain their Brand Lovers. This is the origin behind some of the most effective customer loyalty programs, such as airline miles rewards for frequent fliers.
Balancing Brand Lover Retention with Brand Lover Creation
Creating an effective Cult Brand, particularly in the retail environment, requires strategic thinking. What’s the best way to deploy your organizational assets? Rewarding your Brand Lovers enthusiastically is one option, but companies that rely exclusively upon this strategy are placing a limiting factor on their success.
Hal Briekly, writing for the Harvard Business Review, illustrated this concept with an examination of the airline industry. Two percent of airline customers account for 25 percent of industry revenue; we’d characterize these fliers as Brand Lovers. The airlines reward this 2 percent with lavish premiums and high-touch customer service. The other 98 percent are treated as if they were a homogeneous, monolithic group.
But they’re not. Customer loyalty exists along a continuum. Customers who aren’t quite Brand Lovers might still prefer your company over the competition, just not as consistently. In the continuum, there are also customers who view all of the companies in your industry as veritably interchangeable, with no marked preference or aversion to any one brand. There are customers who don’t like you, but do business with you because they feel they have no other choice. There are customers who are vehemently opposed to your organization’s existence.
Your job as a brand manager is to know how many of your customers fall into each particular group. Briekly discovered that there were 18 percent of airline customers who weren’t exactly Brand Lovers still did quite a bit of flying. In fact, this 18 percent of customers—we’d call them Brand Believers—were responsible for 55 percent of the airline’s revenue.
What do you think would happen if the airlines took some of the resources they were willing to allocate to pleasing their Brand Lovers and devoted them instead to strengthening the relationship they had with Brand Believers? Enhancing an existing relationship requires developing an understanding of this customer groups’ wants and needs. It’s important to identify and articulate how they are both similar to and different from your existing Brand Lovers. This understanding will allow you to identify the messaging and operational tweaks that can bring your Brand Believers over the Brand Lover group.
What would happen to your bottom line if your “Sometimes” customer became an “Always” customer? It can happen, if you’re willing to put your customers first.
Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials
- Rewarding your Brand Lovers is a smart strategy, but it can’t be your only strategy. Balancing Brand Lover Retention with Brand Lover Creation is essential.
- Customer loyalty exists along a continuum. You need a layered understanding of your customers’ feelings about your brand.
- Be willing to go against industry norms. Every airline rewards the top 2%. What will happen to the airline that’s brave enough to reward the top 10%?