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Can Business Achieve True Customer Loyalty?
I am often asked by clients and students to discuss the issue of customer loyalty, customer retention, customer relations, and the lifetime value of customers. In fact, in discussions with students during the first week of April, we kicked around the issue and some of my students ideas are incorporated in the thoughts to follow so thanks to them.
The loyalty cards I carry to obtain a low price at the grocery stores is just that, a discount card. I will go from one grocer to another based on who has the best values that day. So what is true loyalty and how can we in business get even close to having truly loyal customers?
PEOPLE … first, loyalty is a uniquely human endeavor so the dimensions of loyalty rest on human interactions. Don’t expect a plastic card to do what it takes a person to accomplish. We are loyal to people, and to each other.
VALUES…. Our target audiences have shared values and we need to be included in their values. Loyalty needs to includes elements of trust, respect, appreciation and fairness. And by sharing, I mean that values is a two way street and we should expect to receive respect when we give respect, etc. Ritz Carlton famously lives by the mission, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Serving Ladies and Gentlemen” and this is a values based business, a two way street, and a firm that engenders loyalty from customers.
EMOTIONAL…we are emotional when it comes to our love of family, country, flag etc. We well up with pride as the Star Spangled Banner is sung (or cringe when it is abused by a singing group). Loyalty should engender an emotional response. So our marketing efforts need to touch the responsive chords of humanity and associate the brand with our humanity. Speaking of the flag, often we ascribe our loyalty to an idea or ideal through the use of icons and symbols, like the flag. Consider yout use fo symbols in this regard as well.
If you think that true loyalty in business is impossible and that the leaky bucket of customer attrition is a natural part of business, perhaps you need to examine your approach to loyalty.
Marketing Strength Through Weakness
Marketing, whether for beef sandwiches or your own job marketing, can be enhanced by looking at and exploiting a certain weak area in your life and in your business. This sounds a bit counter intuitive to the idea that we should leverage our strengths, so here is the explanation and idea.
In our lives, we have networks of people who may be of help to us, again whether in job searches or in business. Our strongest networks, friends and family, are of course already involved in our marketing, know what we are doing and most importantly, they are a part of our network. So our strongest connects are talking to the same people we are…the idea of “preaching to the choir” comes to mind. So trying hard to leverage our strongest network members might be an exercise in futility. What you might want to consider is a program or process to develop more weak network members who can spread the word to their contacts.
Where can we cultivate more weak network members? We should use the social media approach to include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so forth. Joining various groups in these platforms will help to establish additional weak links. I joined about thirty marketing research groups on LinkedIn to get connected. Between these three programs, I probably have over a thousand weak links to exploit. Where else can you find new and weak links? I was playing Words with Friends the other day…more links to people I don’t know. Who knows, maybe Alec Baldwin was on the other end. Consider joining online leagues; co-creating things like music or papers; create campaigns to get your website or blog site linked both in-bound and out-bound; create more linkages with co-workers, vendors, and customers; share your ideas, photos, and more on various social media sites; and there is Classmates.com to reconnect with old high school connections. We are just getting started. Since moving back into the city, I have so many more neighbors. I am going to meetings this week for training and orientation…these are more then educational meetings, they are all rich networking meeting.
So consider the idea that there is strength in weakness…consider the weakest links as perhaps your greatest opportunities to grow your personal, and professional and business networks.
JH
January 8, 2012