Emotional loyalty: a new opportunity for brands?

March 18, 2024

Genuine emotional bonds between brands and customers enhance revenue and retention but to maximise potential, marketers need to grasp the essential trigger points accurately, highlights Simon Jeffs, principal marketing strategist at relationship marketing specialist Marigold.

While all brands strive for customer loyalty, some successfully achieve dizzier heights, surpassing mere favourability and approaching a level akin to love.

As well as hiking up sales, emotional loyalty reduces churn. A negative experience, such as a late delivery for example, may end a relationship with some brands, but those which have an emotional bond with consumers will often be given a chance to rectify the situation.

“I think of emotional loyalty as loyalty without reason, it’s that way brands bring themselves alive for customers,” Simon Jeffs explains. “Traditional loyalty is normally focussed on keeping customers coming back through discount codes, vouchers and early access to launches and so on. A lot of the time it might just be where a brand fits in with a basic need, such as being the nearest or cheapest petrol station. This traditional loyalty is still something brands need to be good at, it’s basically table stakes. But if they step it up to the next level, and form really meaningful connections with consumers, that’s when you start to build emotional loyalty.”

 

What should brands be doing?

Building a long-term emotional connection revolves around offering the best possible customer care to show people they are truly valued. Promote the core values your brand shares with consumers. Consider choosing a cause and placing it at the centre of marketing communications to show customers they are understood by an organisation that feels the same way.

 

Invest in tech

Companies need to collect detailed information about how individual customers interact with their brands and begin to understand customer behaviour.

“Brands with loyalty programmes will need the right technology to manage that relationship with each customer, with a rules-based engine running rewards,” advises Simon. “To spin this up into driving loyalty without reason, they will need to collect data from major touchpoints and look at loyalty more holistically. They need to be able to take that data and trigger behaviourally driven messaging at those critical moments in a consumer’s relationship with a brand, where they fall in love with it or decide they have had enough and go elsewhere.”

Mastering this will make a brand indispensable in a customer’s life, increasing revenue from purchases, and enhancing the likelihood that they will overlook any mistakes rather than switching to a competitor.

To find out more, download ‘A New Kind of Loyalty: How to build emotional loyalty and drive revenue growth’.

Source: Marketing Week

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