thefunnel

I came across an interesting article about brand loyalty. Basically, the notion is that in the current “participation economy” traditional marketing attention and interruption marketing paradigm) is obsolete and that “movements” needs to be generated instead of communication. The reason for this is that most products are good enough, for what they are intended to do, and the way you succeed in branding is to “achieve or create a loyalty without reason”. This means finding that emotional connection by attaching a level of mystery to the brand (the more the consumer knows about the specifics of a brand the less interesting it becomes), because people are today looking for things beyond rational value. The article claims that this applies equally to B-2-B products, and that intimacy, a story, a relationship leads to “unreasonable loyalty”. In addition marketing should be aiming to measure the return on involvement, rather than the return on investment. The above is one of the reasons, for example, why traditional approaches to market research, based on information, knowledge and data, often fails to provide an accurate prediction on the success of a new product. Marketers should forget about focus groups, because in a focus group environment, customers hide their real feelings towards a brand, and therefore, aspects of “unreasonable loyalty” are never uncovered.