Brand Loyalty and the Marketer!

This is one area that interests me ... marketing :)

Due to the advent of the digital age, the consumer has become the boss in the buyer-seller relationship, as he has the ability to compare prices, has access to a lot of information and subsequently has a lot of influence on the strategies marketers eventually adopt. After all, businesses are in business (pardon the pun) because of the consumers isn't it?

Bain & Company and Kantar Worldpanel's UK Shopper survery find that about half of a brand's 'faithful' customers would leave them in the following year.  This era of increased technology leaves little room for companies to be lackadaisical about their marketing efforts. There is increased effort of organizations to capture the attention of their consumers, and on the other hand, there is a greater effort on the part of the consumers towards getting the best deals across brands.

These days, you can hardly go a day without seeing some really eye-catching adverts and promotions of companies, all offering various incentives to consumers. I must say that I am one person who likes to take advantage of good deals offered by companies. However, I am one of the new age consumers, who are so unfaithful, and would not mind 'trying out' other brands or products. Just one little negative perception of a product, and I am off in search of new offerings :)

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Two opinions of Marketers:

 

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I am 70% sure that there are so many more like me, who do not really stay loyal to one single brand (although there are exceptions as to the category of goods in question), and who like to 'explore' other brands. A brand has to be exceptional to keep me patronizing them. Actually, there is a product I used (of which I would not mention) which turned out to be great. Although I would rate their customer service 3 out of 10, I still keep going back to buy the product. Whenever i get an email of an offer from them, the only thing that would possibly stop me from visiting their website to place an order would be the voice of God. Talk about a company putting having differentiated products. But in actual fact, due to the very much digitalized era we find ourselves, the onus lies with various companies to proove their worth.

In this competitive era, there are lots of companies willing to compromise on the quality of their products in order to bring down prices to attract consumers. Well, they may have short term gains, but in the long run, such consumers (like me) will never repeat a purchase from such companies. To this I say: "what shall it profit a company to attract consumers by offering the lowest prices, only to loose them after their first purchase"?

A lot of companies make huge spends, all vying for the consumers' attention. This is evident in social media, where you constantly see adverts... funny enough, i hardly ever click on the adverts displayed on the right hand corner of my facebook page. Why? probably because when I go to facebook, I want to catch up and see what's been going on with my friends. An advert has to be very attractive to catch my attention. I dont mean attractive just in terms of colours used, but also in wordings used. Trust me, when I see a luxury brand with a '70% off' ad, i am sure to click on it. Surprising? I don't think so. I think I am just one of the 50 million people out of 1.1 billion people on facebook who do that ;)

Liking pages? hmm. I hardly like any pages. The brand has to appeal so much to me before I even consider liking their page. Okay, what about youtube? I absolutely love youtube, but whenever I see an add, I can't wait for the 5 seconds 'skip add' to pop-up. An advert has to be really captivating to get me to watch it. However, some brands are prepared to pay a bit more for their youtube adverts in order to force youtube visitors to watch them... hahahaha. And in such case, my 5 seconds wait is unconditinally extended to some minutes. Great strategy I must say!

Anyway, enough of my rantings for now... just had to put down something I find really interesting!