It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of brand loyalty!  If bringing in first time customers is a challenge, ensuring that they return is an even greater one.  In a tough economic climate, it can be more difficult than ever.

Building Loyalty

Bargains bring customers in.  Such websites as Groupon and LivingSocial, which offer discounted gift certificates, demonstrate this time and again.  But while cut-rate prices may convince customers to try a product or service for the first time, they don’t necessarily keep them coming back.  Nor do they encourage companies to improve the quality of the services or products they provide.

The challenge, for almost any company, is to find compelling reasons for one-time customers to stay with a brand.   Building brand loyalty is key.   The potential payoff from creative brand loyalty programs has never been higher.

 Stages of Brand Preference

There are specific stages to user brand loyalty.  The first is when customers recognize a specific brand.  The second, when they come to prefer it.  The last phase is when they begin to insist on it, and even to defend it.  Each stage is a potential hurdle, one that must be cleared if a company wants to grow and expand its user base.

With our extensive branding experience, Artemia designs and executes branding strategies that work for our clients — and keep their customers coming back.

 Successful Brand Strategies

There are certain elements that every brand strategy must include in order to successfully to build a loyal customer base:

•  It must identify the right customers, the ones a company truly wants, then target them effectively. Some users will remain loyal to a brand, others will not. Targeting the right ones is critically important: it is more cost effective to adopt a focused marketing strategy, rather than a broad one.

• It must tell a compelling story. The emotional backstory is the power behind a brand.  The best ones tell a story about their product or service, then weave it together with one about their end users.  In this way, customers and companies are united in a special relationship.  Users need to identify with the story behind a brand, associating themselves with it personally and emotionally.  The more they draw their friends, families, and communities into that story, the more likely it is that the brand will enter the public’s awareness.

• It must seem authentic. One way to impart authenticity to a brand is to launch a campaign for a cause that it can help to fund and support — reducing AIDS in Africa, say, or reducing climate change, poverty or crime. Supporting popular events can also strengthen a brand.

• It must harnesses users’ positive emotions, inspiring fresh thinking about a brand and, where possible, encouraging past users to return. Today’s successful programs build customer loyalty in a variety of ways, using social media as an integral part of their strategy, while making sure not to neglect more traditional avenues.

ARTÉMIA will work with you to create and communicate the story behind your product, then follow through with an effective long-term strategy.   When loyal users defend a brand, the experience can be intensely personal.  They become ambassadors for it.  Before too long, their friends, families, and communities, having formed positive associations with it, begin to pass the word along. Let us be the champion of your brand’s success!