The Big Picture
By Eric Pakurar, G2

The run-of-the-mill “loyalty” program focuses narrowly on encouraging a consumer who has just bought a product or service to repurchase, whether through points, badges, a punch on a 10-punch card, or any number of other similar mechanisms. But loyalty should be considered more broadly — it includes the purchase-repurchase stage, but is not limited to it. Loyalty is a measure of a given person’s willingness to commit to a brand. Beyond buying the next ice cream cone, it also includes the degree to which I am willing to go out of my way to find Lisa and buy ice cream from her, to be willing to pay a premium and to be an advocate for a specific product, vendor or even scooper.

If that broader definition is true, then the idea of commitment has broad implications for how we think about marketing.

A brand is the sum of our collective encounters with and perceptions of it. All of these encounters are likely to be disconnected and interspersed with encounters with other brands. Our lives are not typically experienced in a linear fashion, and the accumulation of various encounters and experiences with brands can often contain conflicting bits of information. Our brains synthesize it all together, coalescing everything into a single consumer perception of the brand.


To read the full article download The Big Picture (pdf).

Source: The Hub, November/December 2010