Creating Brand Loyalty

Here’s a list of brands for which I am personally brand loyal with. And to the right of each brand I have a given a reason.

Brand & reason
Qantas Domestic:    They are the only full service domestic airline in Australia.

Ripcurl Wetsuits :   They are simply the best quality, and the warmest. I will never, ever switch as the cost of getting it wrong is $600+ mistake. I also love the brand history.

Collingwood FC:    I am a fan and I support the club, in this category performance wont create switching, but it does reduce my purchase frequency

iphone: I love it’s seamless funcationality and integrating so much, I find it hard to believe a better option will ever exist. I don’t even mind putting up with a few dropouts

Crumpler Bags: I love their design, and functionality, I also love the story of how they started and the fact the owners are from my local city.

Seth’s Blog: I know I’ll get a golden entry aroud once a week.

Twitter: It’s the only social network which suits my attitude & lifestyle. I like it’s brevity & immediacy.

Google Search: Works best. Would switch if better one came along. On occasion I now search on twitter for attitudinal & results based on timeliness.

Lavazza Coffee : Best tasting Roast & ground coffee after trying many others.

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If we are fortunate enough to have a level of brand loyalty, then it’s equally important that we understand why we have it. In the case of Qantas, it’s more serendipitous than through providing a super product. Notice I’m only loyal with domestic travel, I’ll switch to Singapore or Cathay on international travel. Other brands like the Collingwood football club suffer from reduced revenue rather than losing market share. And Google, well they are only as good as their product where the switching costs are extremely low…. Once upon a time I was loyal Yahoo search…

The point for startups is simple. The reasons for brand loyalty are varied. Generating it is almost always related to having an awesome product. If our product isn’t awesome enough, then we need to ‘Awesomize it’. Only then will the brand story matter. Once we get loyalty our next job is to build a wall around it where switching costs are too high.

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5 thoughts on “Creating Brand Loyalty

  1. What i really love about this post, Steve, is that you put your heart on your sleeve and tell us what makes you tick, and what a rarity it really is to be truly brand loyal.

    You’re right though – I think about my brand loyalties and they all lead up awesome alley. High five for a great post.

  2. There’s also the other side of the coin as well, understanding that is valuable. What’s the word for loyal in *not* buying your products?

    I don’t fly tiger because flights aren’t reliable enough
    I don’t buy sony because their software is shit and they put rootkits on CDs

    In the first instance, that’s not such a big deal. That is how tiger has such cheap flights, I’m not their target market.
    The second is more important, where Sony’s behaviour on a few specific products have a flow on effect to their entire brand.

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