Is the Brand really dead?
Every few weeks there's an article or an op-ed in the trades that declares brand loyalty brittle at best, dead at worst. The digital age has brought product purchase fluidity by lowering the friction of researching, shopping, and buying to that of sliding bare-assed across wet ice. Marketing digerati would have us believe that this consumption mobility leads to lower brand stickiness, and thus brand loyalty, on the part of consumers. Over the years there have been oodles of surveys to suggest that this is, indeed, true. During the pandemic research companies and the advertisers that rely on them have striven to articulate what people are doing by way of purchase behavior in order to suss out new identifiable rules of thumb for how a person moves along the path to purchase and, therefore, better capitalize on it.
This quest is based on a hodgepodge of advertiser 1st party data and surveys asking people what they think and feel about certain products, and their intentions as they relate to buying those products.
This all leads to innumerable consultants, agencies, and researchers offering to help companies with enhancing customer acquisition and loyalty through myriad combinations of data analysis, tech stacks, and more surveys. And worst of all, irremissible quotes like this: “Antiquated buying and measurement typically associated with traditional mediums have been deprioritized in favor of reaching impactful audiences in relevant ways across all channels,” ... “Consumers are seeking more relevant messaging while advertisers like us … strive to place data at the center of our decision-making. Addressable allows us to go beyond demo-based targets to align with our core and high-growth audiences,” 1 Shudder...
What people say and what people do have always looked at one another across a fairly wide chasm. For years marketers have depended on survey data to get a bead on what customers or prospects think and do in order to better figure out how to get those customers and prospects to buy whatever it is marketers are selling. But those surveys are made up of questions that rely on people's memories (notoriously bad), use words that define traits that are subjective ("healthy" doesn't mean the same thing to a couch-potato as it does a yoga instructor), and require expressing intent to take action in a future one can't really know (e.g. we habitually overestimate action in the short term and underestimate action in the long-term).
The two most important factor to a brand's growth and success is physical availability and mental availability. Without those two elements, the rest is false proscenium and costumes. While we routinely hear about surveys that declare the death of brand loyalty or indicate a large shift from established brands to upstarts, those surveys rarely follow up with data on to what extent the declared behavior takes place. For example, the shift in share that should be demonstrable if the shift is genuinely significant doesn't seem to materialize. A quick look at major brands show that share shifts little if at all over time. Coca Cola has had practically the same market share since 2004. After years of aggressive spending, GEICO and Progressive are the only auto insurers to show share grown, Progressive being the biggest mover, by just over 1%. The truth is that brand loyalty has a lot to do with that physical and mental availability. People in large numbers might indicate they want to change or are planning on making a purchase choice different from the one they've made in the past, but we are always sanguine about our desires and always a bit disappointing in realizing them.
There may be noticeable shifts in smaller if well-established brands, but the brand switching we as an industry like to talk about doesn't happen nearly as much as we talk about it.
If marketers genuinely want to equip decisioning to be better able to move people to action, they need to narrow the gap between what they say, and what they do. Good advice for all of us, really.
“How Marketers Are Reimagining the Consumer Journey in a Post-COVID World.” Ad Age, 24 Mar. 2021, adage.com/article/warnermedia/addressing-consumers-across-new-customer-journey/2323626. ↩︎