Written by Abdulla Mahmood on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership)
In today’s fast paced digital era, there is a clutter of brands popping out of everywhere and anywhere to catch the attention of customers on digital screens and trying to convert them into loyal customers. The marketers are facing unprecedented challenges in achieving their objectives of having customers be loyal to your brand with the hope that they follow the brand on social media platform, endorse your brand and spread the positive word about your brand digitally.
Sometime back a marketing colleague from the industry was discussing with me the scenario of catching the customer’s eyeballs. Expecting consistent loyalty from the ever-demanding customers has become a daunting task as part of brand management. Thanks to the advent of social media, the customers are empowered more than ever, and their loyalty can swing anywhere and anytime depending on their off-line or online brand experience.
I agreed on the points raised by my colleague, but I didn’t want to give my point of view using marketing strategies, management jargons, statistics etc. I was pretty much sure that he may already be bombarded with various marketing gurus’ theories and the abundance of marketing related content available online.
So, I gave my perspective by asking him if he would join me during my next visit to my hair salon. He gave me a weird look which was not unexpected as it may have not made sense to him at that point of time, but I liked his instant response that he was more comfortable going to his regular salon. Bingo!
I asked him why he would stick to the same salon, his answers were brisk as below:
1) The salon is a neat place with good, experienced hairdressers
2) His regular hairdresser knew what kind of a haircut suits him based on the previous umpteen visits to the salon
3) The hairdresser also understands how to change hairstyle suiting his personality depending on new fashion trends
4) The hairdresser gives him a free good head massage that relaxes him post every haircut and sometimes induces him into a facial package when his face looks haggard
5) The cost is not at all high for the services the hairdresser offers him
6) The salon is located close to his house
7) Last but not least, he enjoys the entertaining chats during the hair cut that revolves around his favorite topic of movies and sports while at the same time the hairdresser provides him insights on the local area activities and updates that he may not get to read in the local newspapers.
I was impressed with his customer loyalty to the salon, and I just translated his experiences into a familiar marketing lingo addressing each of his point as below:
1) Quality Products and Services
2) Understanding and Personalizing Customer Needs
3) Improvised Services by Pre-empting Trends
4) Offering Value-Added- Services
5) Offering Value-For-Money
6) Location of Convenience
7) Educate, Engage and Entertain Customers
Digitally the way we communicate with our customers may have changed but the customers’ expectations about product and services may not have drastically changed.
Consistently offer quality product and services with VFM (Value for money) pricing, backed with integrated marketing and periodic research to gauge the consumer and competition trends. In all probability you will have consumers loyal to your brand even when the competition is fighting for the eyeball attention on digital screens. Conquer the marketing funnel using the right MarTech, and AdTech!
My industry colleague couldn’t wait to pay his next visit to the salon to interact with his new “messiah of marketing” so that he could pay closer attention to his experience in order to apply similar marketing skills in his quest to build customer loyalty towards his brands both offline and online!