What has more weight in the consumer’s decision when he is going to buy a product or service of a certain brand? The rational or the emotional part?
Consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say. (David Ogilvy). This is the main purpose of consumer neuroscience and the reason why the understanding of how the brain responds to marketing stimuli and how they affect people’s behavior is so valuable. If it is evaluated because customers want to be loyal to a brand, some will seem like decisions without much rational foundation, more because the customer has reached an emotional state. It is when the client, despite an increase in prices or poor service, has a sentimental attachment. That is why it becomes important and fundamental to know how to measure the emotional loyalty of consumers and determine if the customer has reached an emotional link with the brand or their behavior is only transactional with a high risk of abandonment.
Those in charge of managing loyalty strategies must understand the importance of defining and carrying out the most relevant metrics, however most of them stay with having the most obvious and simple indicators, which is typically behavioral loyalty. In other words, they measure purchasing behaviors such as product favorites or location behavior, customer interaction metrics, frequency, recency, repurchase indicators, or abandonment rates, to name a few. Metrics that indicate the emotional state of the strategy are rarely defined and executed.
Starting from the definition that emotional loyalty is made up of 3 dimensions within which each one must have one or more of its own indicators:
Dimensions
1. Affinity: the person appreciates a brand because they enjoy the product.
Indicators: NPS, CLV, Referrals, Content created by clients, mentions in RSS.
2. Attachment: the person feels appreciated by the brand
Indicators: Measuring customer brand attachment primarily has to do with the brand’s return on investment with that customer (ROI) and what the customer is willing to spend over time. Another measurement that can be done is to correlate the value that the customer perceives receiving from a brand and the value that that customer means for that brand. There are consumers who perceive receiving more value from brands than what the brand gets from them and vice versa. The attachment to the brand grows when the distance between value received and value granted increases.
3. Trust: the person trusts the behavior of the brand. They trust the brand’s ability to deliver the value promise.
Customers who give a brand a high trust score are three times more likely to stick with it, even if they make a mistake. The latter according to HBR. Quantitative and qualitative indicators are combined.
Indicators: CSAT, CES (customer effort score), NPS, FCR (first call resolution).