Every year, there is an increase in internet penetration around the world. Currently, more than 5.45 billion people are connected to the internet. With this, the number of people exposed to and influenced by digital advertising and marketing campaigns is also growing.
Brands are increasingly depending on digital channels and methods that thrive in the digital age to flourish. Digital accounted for 72.7% of all marketing spend in 2024 (up from 54.3% in 2019). This is why brands like GG.BET know that it is more profitable to retain old customers than to acquire new ones; therefore, they are going all in on digital channels to entrench brand loyalty.
Why Every Business Needs to Care About Its Brand Today
Before the digital age, business was primarily local. You advertised within your community in local newspapers, radio, television, and on billboards.
Today, however, competitors can reach customers in your community by advertising to them directly, which makes competition now global. Hence, you must do everything to win business online and to ensure that they keep coming back.
Why Brand Loyalty is Especially Valuable in the Digital Age
You already know that a quality of a loyal customer is that they are repeat buyers. It is the most common quality, but it is not the only quality. The others are almost equally as important:
- They become your advocates:
They’ll tell their friends about you. These friends include their online connections, which could be in the thousands, and a viral, unpaid post could even reach millions. Adversely, if a customer has had a legitimately bad experience with you, posts about it could also cost you loyal customers.
- They tolerate price increases more:
Nobody enjoys having to announce price increases, but if your business unavoidably needs to raise your prices, then that’s where previous investments in establishing brand loyalty will show, as loyal customers are 31% more likely to stay with you in those periods.
So, there are only upsides to investing in building brand loyalty, especially in an age where competition is global, and people see over 5,000 advertisements daily.
The Key Psychological Drivers of Brand Loyalty
Before the internet, conscious business owners could establish brand loyalty through the following efforts:
- Proving that they were trustworthy: Before a time when prospects could research reviews to decide who to patronize, businesses established trust by delivering high-quality products and services to new customers. If you did it right the first time, they were more likely to return.
- Being Consistent: Customers learned to trust businesses that delivered a reliable quality of products or services, and if a company managed to do it consistently, then the customer became loyal. So loyal that they were more forgiving of momentary lapses.
- Habit: This flows from the first two conditions; the moment a customer learned that they could trust a brand’s product, they were more likely to stick with it, as switching could expose them to disappointments from unfamiliar brands. (Remember, public reviews, as they are common today, were rarely available.)
- Emotional Connection: Since audiences were more homogeneous within locales, brands were able to build emotional bonds with customers through nostalgia, identity marketing, and storytelling.
- Cognitive Biases: Once a customer chose a brand to be loyal to, they looked for reasons to justify why they believe that brand is the “best” option, and ignored the negatives. Companies also leaned into that tendency in their advertising to reinforce their selection.
Customers prioritised stability and trustworthiness when choosing a brand to be loyal to in the past, and companies benefited from the paucity of choices and low volume of information available to customers, to enjoy decades-long brand loyalty. But is that still the case today?
Brand Loyalty in the Digital Age
In the Digital Age, customers have access to a lot more information about businesses, and they can patronise vendors located far away.
As a consequence of this, the parameters for establishing brand loyalty have also expanded, with customers now seeking new ways to sift through the noise of advertising, misinformation, and scams. Here are the updated drivers of brand loyalty in the Digital Age:
- Trust Requires Transparency
Customers are now more aware of how a high-quality product is made and should function. Hence, it is not enough to say, “our product does this and that”; you get extra points if you can involve the customer in the production process. This is known as being “authentic”
- Emotional Connection is Tied to Identity
Never has identity and the need to “feel seen” been as important as in this age. Identity today has expanded from ethnicity and culture, and is now based on causes, values, lifestyles, and self-image, and communities that share the strongest emotional bonds now transcend locales, hence your brand communications must acknowledge that.
- Customers Rank Experience Highly
Downstream of the abundance of options and lower cost of switching is that customers now rank the buying experience as high as the function of the product, and since your competition can now reach your customers directly through their devices, you must ensure to always give costumers the best experience, whether it be social media interactions, or customer service, or delivery. Very rarely do customers struggle to find a brand that can deliver high-quality products, but good customer service and buying experience are the new frontiers of brand differentiation.
To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper
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