Five sources of brand loyalty the web has disrupted and six suggestions for what to do about it. Written by @simonpearcelive

1. Exit through the internet
How the web disrupts brand
loyalty and what to do about itFabricBranding

2. Five important sources of
brand loyalty that the
internet has disrupted…

3. 20th century brands built
loyalty through familiarity
and familiarity through
repetition…
…but the internet prefers
novelty to repetition.
Source #1
Familiarity

4. Unhappy customers always told people; that was
damaging. Millions of hits on YouTube is more damaging.
Source #2
The communications monopoly

5. Better, faster, cheaper
Source #3
Limited awareness of alternatives

6. Online retailers will ship anything,
anywhere. Distribution is no longer the
source of advantage it once was.
Source #4
Proprietary Distribution

7. Source #5
The allure of perfection
Lifestyle branding
will always have a
role to play, but the
popularity of sites
like YouTube show
us that being “real”
is increasingly more
important than
being “perfect”.

8. What’s a brand to do?

9. Lots of prescriptions being offered
Content
Marketing
Social Media
BIG DATA
Take Four
Daily

10. The real problem is hard to pin down

11. Too much focus on the latest marketing
tools when the true answer lies deeper
inside your business?

12. The true impact
of the internet
Customers no longer have
to stay with brands that
they are not ecstatic about.
No amount of clever
targeting will overcome this
simple truth. In almost
every category, it’s too easy
to switch to a new provider
for a product or service.

13. Customer experience is the biggest driver
of loyalty and customer recommendations
Note: *As measured by the Forrester Research “Customer Experience Index”
Source: Forrester Research: Manning, Harley; Bodine, Kerry (2012-08-28).
0.71 0.65
Correlation between customer
experience index and future
purchase intent*
Correlation between customer
experience index and positive
word-of-mouth*

14. Social media is best used to support, not
replace, a great customer experience
Social media offers tremendous
promise for brands that can
incorporate it into a broader
strategy of building and managing
relationships with customers.
Promotional gimmicks aimed at “buying” likes on Facebook or
re-tweets on Twitter have little true impact on a brand’s
fortunes. Such approaches are applying, on the internet, the
very tactics that the internet has already made redundant.

15. Six prescriptions for building
powerful brands now
1. Outstanding experiences trump outrageous promises
2. A great customer experience is not an accident, it must be
designed
3. Companies need to work across departmental boundaries
to design and deliver those great customer experiences
4. The best, most credible, brand stories are developed
organically, through real-world interactions with customers
5. Digital strategy and customer relationship strategy should
be developed together, as two sides of the same coin
6. Empower frontline employees to use social tools to build
strong customer relationships

16. We hope you enjoyed this presentation,
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