« SALON ACQUA: The power of paying attention. | Main | 100 Days »
Loyalty Matters
It’s hard to imagine that a consumer’s brand loyalty might trump real-time experience, but neuro-scientific research aimed at understanding consumer behavior demonstrates just that point. Consumers are willing to reconsider – and even change – conclusions about their experience when they find that their experience is inconsistent with feelings of previously established loyalty.
This research vividly illuminates a critical business strategy distinction. Satisfaction with a product or service is not the same as loyalty to a product or service. Assumptions about the interconnectedness between satisfaction and loyalty frequently cause the terms to be used interchangeably. It would seem that loyalty is far more durable than satisfaction. It’s not so counterintuitive, when you think about it. How many of us remain loyal to people who disappoint us or to causes that occasionally wander from their greater good?
Graduate students from the University of Wisconsin’s Bolz Center for Arts Administration presented some intriguing research findings at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference on Sunday, January 22nd. Their presentation, which explored how people construct meaning, bridged the fields of neuro-science, consumer behavior, and social psychology.
Consumers participating in a blind taste test comparing Pepsi to Coke were placed inside a magnetic resonance imaging device (fMRI) capable of portraying particular brain activities such as responses in the brain’s pleasure center – located in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. When a respondent consumer discovered a discontinuity between previously expressed brand loyalty and immediate experience, the consumer would often retract statements about which cola tasted best a few seconds ago. “Oh no, I really liked the other one more, now that I think about it.�
The fMRI device allows researchers to witness pictures of brain activity patterns that show excitement of pleasure centers; changes caused by the experience of cognitive dissonance; and the restoration of cognitive harmony when experience, perception, and loyalty constructs all align.
Think about this: If someone’s brand loyalty will drive them to let loyalty trump an in-the-moment experience, how feasible is it to construct strategies that will change loyalties? Just how important is building a robust brand?
One of the most important things to understand about brand communications is that they occur over a long time horizon. Brand communication is rich, textured, impressionistic, experiential, and personally meaningful. Brand equities, like financial equities, are built over time.
It’s not the same as sales communication – comprised of messages that are designed to be delivered quickly and vividly: make your point, communicate the offer, portray the benefits, and drive the target consumer to consideration, and with luck, to choice.
In one very important strategic sense, brands are like people. We’re loyal – and forgiving – to those we like and love. This is core to understanding brand strategy. It’s the long haul that matters.
It is unlikely that our families, clans, nations, or perhaps even our species would have survived without “loyalty.� If it isn’t hard-wired, it must live deep within the set of impulses that serve our emotional and biological sustainability.
Loyalty matters.
Posted on January 31, 2006 10:30 AM | Permalink
Bookmark with: 
del.icio.us, 
StumbleUpon, 
digg