How to Make Customers Love Your Brand
How to make customers Love a brand?
Brand is the “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller 's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers”1. The difficulty when considering brands is, not only how to make the brand you represent to be the first thing that comes to the customer’s head when he is considering the purchase of a good or service, but also how to develop such strong ties with your customers that we can say with certainty that they have developed brand loyalty. Brand loyalty consists of a consumer 's commitment to repurchase or otherwise continue using the brand and can be demonstrated by repeated buying of a product or service, or other positive behaviors such as word of mouth advocacy.2 But the quest of making the customer love a brand does not end there. A customer may very well be loyal to a brand but that does not necessarily mean he loves it. His loyalty may be the result of his insecurity to try a new product and thus his repeated buying of the product does not mean he loves the product’s brand. The first step towards making customers love your brand is to determine what the brand does best. After that comes the time to be bold. It is imperative to differentiate the brand around its strengths. Secondly, you have to get to know your customers. It is really important for the brand to have a complete understanding of who its customers really are. How they think, feel and behave towards the brand, the product or service and what their reactions might be to any changes implemented by the company. The brand has to understand the customers’ drivers of choice and develop around its best customers. A great example, demonstrating how these two steps help a brand gain the love of its customers, is of course Apple. Apple is one of the most innovative brands in the world, producing hi – tech, stylish products. With the return of Steve Jobs, Apple took some bold decisions. Following a nicely executed
Brand is the “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller 's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers”1. The difficulty when considering brands is, not only how to make the brand you represent to be the first thing that comes to the customer’s head when he is considering the purchase of a good or service, but also how to develop such strong ties with your customers that we can say with certainty that they have developed brand loyalty. Brand loyalty consists of a consumer 's commitment to repurchase or otherwise continue using the brand and can be demonstrated by repeated buying of a product or service, or other positive behaviors such as word of mouth advocacy.2 But the quest of making the customer love a brand does not end there. A customer may very well be loyal to a brand but that does not necessarily mean he loves it. His loyalty may be the result of his insecurity to try a new product and thus his repeated buying of the product does not mean he loves the product’s brand. The first step towards making customers love your brand is to determine what the brand does best. After that comes the time to be bold. It is imperative to differentiate the brand around its strengths. Secondly, you have to get to know your customers. It is really important for the brand to have a complete understanding of who its customers really are. How they think, feel and behave towards the brand, the product or service and what their reactions might be to any changes implemented by the company. The brand has to understand the customers’ drivers of choice and develop around its best customers. A great example, demonstrating how these two steps help a brand gain the love of its customers, is of course Apple. Apple is one of the most innovative brands in the world, producing hi – tech, stylish products. With the return of Steve Jobs, Apple took some bold decisions. Following a nicely executed
References: 1. American Marketing Association Dictionary. 2. Dick, Alan S. and Kunal Basu (1994), "Customer Loyalty: Toward an Integrated Conceptual Framework," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 22 (2), 99-113. 3. Albert, N., Merunka, D. and Valette-Florence, P. (2008). 'When consumer love their brands: Exploring the concept and its dimensions '. Journal of Business Research, 61, 1062-1075. 4. McAlexander, J.H., Kim, S.K. and Roberts, S.D. (2003). 'Loyalty: the Influences of Satisfaction and Brand Community Integration '. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Fall 2003, 1-8. 5. http://beloved-brands.com/2012/04/22/consumer/ 6. http://www.cult-branding.com/knowledge-center/cb-profiles/apple-cult-brand-profile/#stats 7. http://www.apple.com/befr/pr/