Thinking on Loyalty & Customer Experiences

What drives loyalty? Why do we spend lots of time with some brands, but don’t feel loyalty towards them? What about the opposite — sometimes we feel very loyal to brands we may rarely purchase from? This week we talk about BTS, Nike and other brands that drive lots of loyalty among their customer base. We quickly agree that having multiple points for people to “meet” the brand is important, but what happens after that — what drives a customer down the path of loyalty? Is it always necessary that the customers feels they have disproportionate value being given to them from the relationship to move further down the loyalty journey? Or is there something deeper around values alignment? Divya raises some strong points around expectation setting, and how many brands a customer can be a super fan, or regular fan of, from a capacity point of view. Kahran brings up his experience with finding detergent, and falling in love with the flower brand, Farmerr.in, to strongly push the point that values are what has driven him towards loyalty to brands. We also briefly talk about startups in India in the 1990s, the recent move away from differentiating on cost alone in the last few yeas, and how well understanding their own values has impacted businesses we’ve worked with. Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com