How does brand loyalty affect purchasing decisions?

Samsung or iPhone? Coca-Cola or Pepsi? What makes us prefer one brand over another? Habit, quality, or price? Or other things? Which plays the biggest role in customer preference for a product or service? There is a range of motives and reasons why customers prefer a particular brand over another. Perhaps the most important of these are Brand Loyalty and Customer Loyalty.

There is no doubt that achieving brand loyalty is not easy, but it is a long-term and continuous journey. The market is not static and the consumer does not know stability, which applies to all things around us. So what is brand loyalty and how do you achieve it?

table of contents:

What is Brand Loyalty?

Brand loyalty can be defined as an emotionally charged decision that stems from the emotional or psychological attachment that binds the consumer to a particular brand and makes him prefer it over competitors and commit to repurchasing its product or service. So it is a psychological commitment by the consumer to repurchase a product or service in the future.

What is the difference between customer loyalty and brand loyalty?

Many people confuse customer loyalty with brand loyalty, although they are very different, they both have a significant impact on customer retention and repurchase rates. So what is customer loyalty? Customer loyalty is closely related to the prices and offers you offer to your customers and make them repeat purchases.

In short, the concept of customer loyalty is related to the total purchasing power of customers, and there is a direct relationship between offering lower prices than competitors and obtaining more customers, in this case, loyalty is not to products, but to the lower price.

Unlike customer loyalty, Brand Loyalty is not linked to the prices you offer or the offers. quality and the best.

Marketing strategies that build customer loyalty include awarding bonuses and incentives and creating brand ambassadors. Building brand loyalty depends mainly on trust. The decision of customers to buy the product may be conscious or unconscious, as it arises from an emotional engagement between the consumer and the brand resulting from his confidence in the brand meeting his needs.

Types of customer loyalty to the brand

There are 6 consumer brand loyalty patterns:

  1. Loyal Consumer: This type refers to loyal consumers who keep buying the products and services of a particular brand all the time.
  2. Divided loyalists: It is consumers whose loyalty is divided into more than one brand. His loyalty may be to one, two, or three brands.
  3. Converting Loyalty: A consumer who switches loyalty from one brand to another.
  4. Who has no loyalty: a consumer who is not associated with any loyalty to any brand or “has no loyalty to any brand.”
  5. Price-dependent customers: This consumer has his first loyalty to the price, and therefore he has no loyalty to a specific brand, but his loyalty is temporary according to the lowest price.
  6. Loyal customers by habit: They are customers who used to buy a certain brand, and therefore their loyalty is motivated primarily by habit and not by anything else.

While some divide loyalty to the brand into:

  1. False: the customer purchases a product or service motivated by certain stimuli, which may be situational influences or social norms, but these positive tendencies are short-lived.
  2. Actual: In this type, customer loyalty and devotion to the brand are at their peak, and the customer rejects competitors' offers.
  3. Voluntary: The customer has relative loyalty, but the chances of repurchasing are also low.

The importance of brand loyalty

Why do brands seek to build brand loyalty? Studies have shown that 75% of customers are willing to pay a higher price for a product for the characteristics that distinguish a particular brand, including quality, buying from famous places, etc. Several benefits are accruing to your brand due to customer loyalty, including:

1. Customer retention

If attracting new customers is important, retaining existing customers is even more important because it is less expensive. Did you know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is seven times the cost of maintaining an existing customer? Here lies the importance of customer loyalty to the brand about the product.

The main advantage of customer loyalty to a particular brand is the ability of this brand to retain them, thus reducing the marketing budget aimed at attracting customers. Retaining customers and increasing their satisfaction with the product is easier than attracting new customers, so keep your customer and don't let it slip out of your hands and go to your competitors.

In addition to contributing to building a strong customer base for the brand, loyal customers do not go to a competing brand and buy products repeatedly, regardless of price changes or competitors' marketing campaigns.

2. Create a positive mental image

When a customer develops loyalty to a particular brand, he has a positive mental image of it and thus transfers it to the surrounding community, which enhances its positive image and increases its sales percentage. A satisfied customer is the best marketer, and many consumers buy a specific service or product based on a nomination. recommendations of those around them.

3. Competitive advantage for the company

Customer loyalty to a particular brand is a strong competitive advantage for it and supports it in the face of competitors and market fluctuations. Where it is difficult for competitors to change the loyalty of customers of a particular brand in their favor.

4. Increasing the market share

Increasing the percentage of sales is one of the important advantages of having loyal customers for a particular brand, which raises its market share and ensures that it remains strong in the competition. One of the impacts of brand loyalty on consumer behavior is the repurchase decision.

How to build brand loyalty

Building Brand Loyalty needs good planning, execution, and allocation of a good plan being an ongoing process, and the formation of an organization's Brand Loyalty Management Team is inevitable. And to manage the brand well, here are a set of strategies that help you in that:

1. Present your work properly

Follow the steps to build brand loyalty without neglecting any of them, and presenting your product or services correctly to the public is crucial. To achieve this, focus on giving your products and services value through which you convince the consumer that you are the right partner for him, to bring him to the stage of adopting the product or service. Focus on the pain points of your customers - the problem - and then explain to them effectively how the product or service that you provide can heal This provides them with a successful solution.

During the marketing of the product or service, focus on the value it adds to customers and the solutions it provides to them, do not focus on describing the quality of the product only. Contain your customers' concerns as much as possible to gain their trust. Train a professional team to deal with unsatisfied customers, whether by answering the phone, emails, and social media. Listen to your customers' complaints well, know the reason for their dissatisfaction, and then find a solution to the problem as soon as possible. Don't worry about this escalation phase.

Fortunately, we'd like to tell you that customers who had a bad experience and received excellent service to resolve it are more likely to become more brand loyal than customers who didn't have a complaint.

2. Create your own story

Creating a strong story about your brand contributes to building and enhancing customer loyalty to it. Give your customers a clear answer about why you work, how your company was created, and why you are in the market in a way that attracts customers to interact with you. Remember that a story interacts with the human brain just like real events, so make sure your story is not without conflict and doesn't tell a dull story that doesn't attract customers.

Perhaps one of the very successful and influential stories is the story of the establishment of Facebook, Amazon “Jeff Bozis”, the Alibaba store, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and others. We all know how these companies started and what difficulties their founders faced in the beginning.

3. A customer service team

The best way to win over your customers is to treat them in such a way that they feel like your organization fully caters to their needs. Organize customer data, then use this information so that each customer gets the right value for him from your product. When dealing with customers, be sure to follow the farming mechanism instead of hunting.

4. Participation

What is meant by participation here is the participation of customers in the brand, by listening to their opinions and suggestions in designing the product. Most customers when interacting with a brand expect to be answered within four hours. This may seem more difficult, but chatbots make it easier. Use case management to get customer issues to the right department.

5. Implement loyalty programs

The organization needs to continue paying attention to its loyal customers, so the organization must adopt loyalty programs for customers that target customers correctly. A study must be conducted to choose the right customer by targeting personalities who will actually buy. And remember that it is the small details that win the hearts of customers, so take care of the smallest details of your customers by designing a loyalty program suitable for your business and your customers.

6. Pay attention to the emotional side of customers and create an interactive community

The organization must provide a good consumer experience with a focus on the emotional side. Make your brand's electronic presence, especially on social media, distinctive and effective. Employ social media channels as a nucleus for building a loyal community around your business.

Create an influx of stories and posts that speak to your customers, and with videos and photos, make them feel like they're talking to a regular person, not a brand. If you do not have a digital marketing team, you can hire a freelancer on the Fiverr platform.

7. Adopt a good UX for your site

Most consumers now shop online, so providing your website with a good user experience is very important and a powerful tool to increase customer loyalty, it is enough to know that 88% of shoppers expressed their unwillingness to shop again from some online stores because of the experience Bad user UX, plus 70% of digital businesses fail for the same reason.

There is a relationship between brand loyalty and the Internet, so if you already own a site, we recommend continuous development and improvements in navigation, speed, clarity, and more.

8. Transparency

We live in the information age, so access to any information is possible and available. Do not hide information from your customers, follow transparency and acknowledge the mistakes made by your brand and take responsibility for them. You can shed light on the mechanism by which you provide your products and services, and care for the environment and social responsibility.

9. Prices

Providing offers, low prices, and discounts helps keep customers and makes them feel that you are offering the cheapest price among competitors. Always build marketing and sales programs that attract your customers.

What are the factors affecting brand loyalty?

There are several factors affecting customer loyalty to a particular brand, including:

First: quality and perceived value

Simply put, perceived value is the customer's perception of the quality and value of a particular product compared to competitors, which adds a competitive advantage to a particular brand. The perceived value is intangible or tangible, but rather a set of feelings and feelings for the consumer about the benefit and quality of a particular product. Is achieving the perceived value easy?

The truth is that achieving the perceived value of a brand is not easy, and this is due to several reasons, on top of which is the increase in customer expectations driven by continuous development and fierce competition by different brands, in addition to the fact that the perceived value is achieved after the consumer uses a specific product and not before it, and this means the necessity Product quality and consumer satisfaction.

Perceived value gives a brand a range of benefits including:

  • Distinguish among competitors.
  • The brand manages to raise its price.
  • A strong reason for consumers to buy.
  • Opening horizons for the brand to expand and introduce new products.

Quality plays a big role in customer loyalty to the brand and has a set of criteria including:

  • Product quality.
  • Price is a key factor in attracting customers.
  • Innovation means the brand's ability to provide its customers with everything new.
  • Places of distribution usually symbolize brand value.

Second: Paying attention to customers' behavioral and sensory experiences

A study conducted on 383 customers of self-service stores in Egypt (Carrefour, Hyper One, and Spinneys) found a strong relationship between behavioral and sensory customer experiences and brand loyalty, which means that marketing managers should pay attention to creating a positive sensory and behavioral experience for customers in While dealing with workers and employees and gaining their trust.

Third: internal marketing

In the sense that the organization is interested in the internal marketing process, which considers that the workers within the organization are internal customers, and it is necessary to take care of them and raise their job satisfaction. When the cadres are properly qualified, they provide good customer service to consumers and are a good interface for the organization, which helps to raise brand loyalty. Don't overlook the role of relationship marketing in customer loyalty to your brand.

Examples of brand loyalty

To be more clear, here are examples of brand loyalty:

Apple

Brand loyalty is embodied in its best form in Apple, the company has a large number of loyal customers and the reason for this is that Apple was able to meet the needs of its customers, provide high-quality products, and constantly innovate in customer technology. Apple has benefited from this, and the company has achieved increased customer retention and reduced marketing costs.

You may have followed the news of Apple's release of a new phone or a new product one day and noticed a large number of consumers booking their new copy of Apple products. It may even come to the presence of long lines of customers in front of one of the company's outlets, and although the prices of its products may be high, Its loyal customers accept no substitute.

The key here lies in the quality and added value of Apple products represented in “excellence”, whereby its customers feel that they are distinguished because they use Apple products, and this is what we call building brand loyalty.

Adidas

To form and build brand loyalty, it is necessary to present an image that matches your vision and values. For example, we all know the famous brand Adidas, which specializes in the field of sports clothing, shoes, and cosmetics, and it presents its image, values, and vision professionally.

Adidas works in the sports field, which is the passion and fondness of its founder, the famous athlete, and shoemaker “Adolf Dassler”, and everything in it expresses its motto “There is no impossible”. So how did Adidas build loyalty to its brand?

  • Adidas identified its target group: as “athletes” and then expanded its category to all those interested in sports from the general public, listened to them, knew the problems they faced, and tried to meet their requests.
  • Quality: It has maintained the quality of its products over the years.
  • Innovation: Adidas has gained a competitive advantage in the market from the very beginning, providing shoes for players and then continuing to innovate in its various products.
  • Listening to its customers: Adidas is always keen to listen to athletes, know their needs, and meet them, to always be at their expectations and even exceed them, and therefore it has achieved an important point, which is customer participation.
  • Community Participation and Responsibility: She also participated in making many sporting events in the world, which gave her continuity and steadfastness in front of competitors.

Why do some brands lose the loyalty of their customers?

Some brands lose the loyalty of their customers because they stop understanding and meeting their needs, and no longer satisfy customer expectations, as well as due to lack of development and keeping pace with the market and product development, and finally, when their products become of less quality, customers begin to form loyalty to competing brands.

In conclusion: Brand Loyalty is an integrated process with various elements, whether studying the market, understanding customers’ needs, listening to them, and creating a good buying experience for them, or caring about product quality, caring for innovation, and providing competitive prices.

Finally, paying attention to the human element that provides service to customers from the internal marketing of the organization. When these elements are complete and harmonious together, building brand loyalty becomes easy, keeping in mind that it is a long journey and there is no point in stopping because it means failure.