Brand Loyalty

What is Brand Loyalty? 

Brand Loyalty is an emotional attachment to the products or services associated with a brand. It is considered as an intangible asset which cannot be measured in quantifiable terms.

Brand Loyalty is far more complex, and it defined when consumers repeatedly purchase or avail products or services by one particular company instead of other company with similar offerings.

It is often based on consumer perception. Often a user consistently purchases or avails the same product or services because of the personal choice based on various opinions and views.

One such example is Apple as they seem to have incredibly dedicated followers. Even when there are similar other competitive options available in the market with comparatively lesser price, Apple fans still buy the products. They could be trusting Apple or liking its operating system or just owning the product for the sake of brand loyalty. 

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What Are Some Famous Examples of Brand Loyalty? 

Apart from Apple, one such brand which has a religiously loyal customer base is Harley Davidson. There are other best performing vehicles in the market, and yet brand evokes loyalty so much so that its customers get the brand logo tattooed on them.

Amazon is another prominent brand that is now gaining brand loyalty by offering diversified products and services, continually upping its service standards and customer equation.

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What are the Types of Brand Loyalty?

• Attitudinal loyalty is exhibited when the customer is willing to purchase a product or service from the brand at any cost, irrespective of prevailing circumstances. This depicts emotional attachment of the consumer as the product fulfills some emotional or functional requirement. This factor is psychological and leads to the behavioral aspect.
• Behavioral loyalty is related to repurchasing from the same brand regularly. It could be because of laziness or brand preference.

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What is the Significance of Brand Loyalty?

Brand Loyalty plays an important role in business sustenance and profitability given the fiercely competitive world. Below are some of the benefits companies leverage by enjoying brand loyalty:

• Brand loyalty reduces the cost of products because of the higher sales volume.
• Companies with loyal customers don't have to spend a lot of money on marketing the product or creating brand awareness; the brand is already established with a loyal consumer base.
• This permits the company to focus on retaining the existing consumers. Primarily their brand-loyal consumers are their brand ambassadors, as they influence the market knowingly or unknowingly.
• Companies with reasonable brand loyalty emphasizes on maintaining more earnings or investing in other resources.
• Another interesting fact is that such companies are unbending when it comes to premium pricing. It increases the profit margins as the loyal consumers are irrationally unaffected in purchasing the product. 

How to Develop Brand Loyalty? 

Creating brand loyalty is an important parameter to survive in contemporary extremely competitive world. Below are some aspects that can be looked at while working on enhancing brand loyalty:

• Creating Sense of Commitment: A critical factor to be considered while developing brand loyalty is building a connection between the consumer and the brand. Commitment can consist of both attitudinal and behavioral components, and both of them are equally important.

Many brands also offer brand loyalty programs to keep their existing customers engaged and connected. 

• Ensuring Consistency of Purchases: Businesses convince potential customers about the significant advantages their products offer over other products in the market. It helps them justify the consistency of their purchase of the products.
• Staying on the Toes for Consistent Quality Offering: Businesses need to focus their energy on client’s expectations, which if unfulfilled will lead to clients substituting with competitor’s offerings. Delivering quality products matching with customer preferences and tastes is critically important.
• Advertisement and Marketing Plays a Key Role: Companies who produce quality and reliable products or services at perfect pricing to dominate the market space optimise brand loyalty by advertising these variables successfully. They can frequently advertise with feel-good elements, catchy phrases, humour or emotional appeal or interest. 

Advertising the brand and its eye-catchy logo, along with key features and pricing on different media and social platforms aid in enhancing the process of brand loyalty.

• Creating Brand Loyalty Towards the Business: Many times, marketers are seen boosting the preference given by the customers to their products over other products. With such advertising promoting brand loyalty to one of the products, marketers try to develop brand loyalty towards the overall company and other products.

• Building Loyalty with Customers: It is said that the way to increase brand loyalty with the customers is to be loyal to the customers. Brands which develop solutions to deliver the right service and support along with the quality product achieve loyalty from customers. 

• Satisfactory Customer Service: Marketers often wonder if it is developing a unique product enough. In times like these, when one unique product is launched, within a few months, ' competitors will come up with a similar product probably with less price and more features. Hence the brand loyalty now depends on the services the company offers and how it communicates with the customer.

When a satisfied customer is engaged for a more extended period, it creates a connection between the customer and the company which is beyond a business relationship. Brands these days use social media as a platform to reach out and connect with the customers.

When a consumer shows devotion, bond and commitment to repurchase and continue to use a brand's products or services, regardless of the competitors’ products or pricing, companies can be assured of their success in creating brand loyalty. 

How to Evaluate Brand Loyalty? 

Time, volume, frequency and price of sales are quantifiable measures to measure brand loyalty. While, Customer satisfaction, as well as an emotional appeal are statistical approximations that are unreliable most of the time.

Big data provides statistical information, but it's not an accurate permutation combination formula to determine brand loyalty. 

Therefore, it is said that brand loyalty is like an art and not a science.

Below influencing factors are considered while evaluating brand loyalty success:  

1. Price 
2. Geography
3. Time spent viewing product ads 
4. Volume of the product at the store shelves 
5. Frequency of the ads shown to the audience 
6. Emotional appeal 

These factors do not determine brand loyalty accurately with merely having statistical results. There is no such possible cause-effect analysis of the data as brand loyalty depends on many vague concepts and variables.