Brand Devotion - achieve more with your customers

Customers are totally in control of their relationship with your brand and ultimately your profitability.  This creates the colossal challenge for all marketers as to how they can encourage their customers to intentionally choose and interact with their brand over their competitors but more importantly, how to become the customer's subconscious brand of choice.

Add to this the myriad of ways in which customers can communicate with each other and with brands, and the promiscuous buying behaviour which is increasingly being exhibited, the path to being the brand of choice is fraught with complexity.  It will be those brands who fully understand the customer with whom they want to interact, what prompts them to purchase, and how to create a relevant value proposition for them, who will have the greatest chance to succeed.

Brand Devotion is a new strategic model which aims to harness the power of your customers by fostering a greater emotional connection.  It will allow you to evaluate your marketing and loyalty strategy to better engage with your customers and develop more profitable relationships. 

The Science of Relationships

ICLP has developed a new method of measuring and improving customer loyalty for the 21st Century. It is borne out of over twenty years experience in loyalty marketing, working with hundreds of companies locally and globally who aspire to forge closer and more meaningful relationships with their customers.

The development of Brand Devotion was prompted by the rapid adoption by customers of new technologies which has driven a shift in the ways in which customers and companies want to interact and engage with each other.

Brand Devotion caters for these needs by applying a tried and tested relationship science to take the scope of current loyalty thinking to the next level. The model provides insight which can be used to build more meaningful interactions with customers to increase profitability.

The Ingredients for Brand Devotion

The Brand Devotion model consists of three key dimensions necessary for successful customer relationships: Passion, Commitment and Intimacy.

Intimacy highlights the creation of knowledge and insight from data to develop closer relationships through more relevant communication

1. Commitment focuses on the retention and management of relationships through a formal, but not necessarily explicit structure and includes the all-important service and support responsibilities
2. Passion fosters a more exciting and emotional engagement with a brand through interactivity and the delivery of a differentiated experience which extends beyond the core product/service

Looking at some industry leaders, Virgin as a brand would score highly on Passion with its championing of consumer rights and environmental issues and Virgin Atlantic has secured the broad Commitment of their customers through their structured relationship programme, Flying Club. Amazon demonstrate a clear focus on Intimacy as their use of customer profile data derived from browsing and shopping habits allows them to provide personalized recommendations that reflect a customer's interests not just their purchasing patterns.

These three dimensions can be used to map and monitor the depth of the brand-customer relationship. The overall methodology also enables comparisons to be made amongst brands with specific and measurable initiatives providing clear direction on how to achieve the right balance of each dimension for your customer relationships.

So by marrying up best-practice loyalty techniques with the new Brand Devotionä approach, companies and brands will be able to achieve more with their customers and identify new ways to build stronger and more profitable relationships.