As part of The Drum's retail coverage, strategist Julien Normand reveals how marketers and consumers rarely share the same view on loyalty and reciprocity.
Reciprocity is a powerful human bias. When someone does something kind for us, we feel we have to respond in kind. We feel obligated to do so, and we return the favor. It makes us feel “very grateful” to do so. Reciprocity is not just a civilized social norm; it is thought to be an evolutionary trait that helped early humans cooperate, improve their chances of survival, and ultimately create society. Thus, reciprocity is naturally present everywhere in our lives, influencing every interaction. In marketing, reciprocity is like a rainbow; its appearance changes depending on our perspective.
Reciprocity from a Marketer's Perspective
As marketers, we often get carried away with our own creation. We produce slide after slide, creating a distorted alternate world where the role of branding is ludicrously obscuring true human insight. Sometimes we climb the profit ladder too far and develop a hero complex. We no longer just sell products, we improve lives. We convince ourselves that our products and services delight consumers by satisfying their stated or implicit needs and solving problems they didn’t even know they had. Reciprocity looks like rainbows in the dark, because we assume that grateful consumers will reward our brand with loyalty and advocacy.
Of course, delivering a great experience is desirable and increases the likelihood of support when people try something new. But consumers don't switch brands like they're converting to a new religion and never looking back. Even if some do, it would be merely a rounding error in brand growth rates. Instead, we now know that consumers exhibit divided loyalties; that is, they have polygamous loyalties within a particular brand repertoire. The more you buy from a category, the larger your repertoire will be. The fewer you buy, the more likely you are to choose category bestsellers and limit the size of your repertoire. These are empirical patterns discovered by Andrew Ehrenberg more than half a century ago and replicated by his successors such as the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
“Consumers are busy people, with hundreds of thousands of brands competing for their attention. […] Thus, the choice of brand is a minor consideration compared to the decision to buy from the category or not,” Byron Sharpe summarises. How brands grow.
Relationships from the perspective of ordinary people
The average person receives money in exchange for a product or service. Reciprocity occurs when the product or service delivers on its promise — whether that be avoiding a pitfall or delivering a great experience — and they're simply giving back.
In the mind of the person trying the brand, an association is formed between the brand, the product or service, and the experience: “The kids emptied their plates.” “The deodorant didn't stink and didn't leave stains on my shirt.” “They delivered on time.” Although these experiences are positive, it's too early to call them a correlation.
Let's see the same rainbow, and maybe we can start holding hands
Marketers need to temper their expectations of consumer gratitude. True loyalty is rare. Great product experiences should be pursued, but they are not enough. It's like holding the door for a stranger at the grocery store and expecting romance in return. It's a better chance than slamming the door, but there's still a long way to go.
To see the same rainbow as your consumers, you need to meet them where they are and adopt their perspective. In my first marketing class, too long ago to mention here, the lecturer wrote on the board a phrase that initially made me yawn and cringe: “Marketing is putting the consumer at the center of your company.” Students and those outside of marketing naturally dismiss this as a hackneyed cliché. It's not until you become an experienced marketing professional that you realize how few companies really try to understand their consumers. This is not just a cliché, it's a guiding principle. The mindset that Mark Ritson describes as market orientation “urges managers to recognize the fundamental truth that a) consumers are the source of the company's success, but b) these consumers inevitably see the world in a very different light than the employees who devise strategies aimed at them.”
A market orientation helps forestall preconceived notions about consumer behavior. Research should cover actual purchase data (behavior) and not just what consumers feel and think (attitudes), which can easily be misinterpreted and manipulated to confirm existing biases.
Don't be fooled by survey results that say, “When consumers try our product, they love it and buy it.” Statements like this are ubiquitous and are often used as epitaphs for the growing number of new product failures. They usually reflect a positive reaction from survey participants to the team they interviewed, and are likely reciprocal.
Instead, research needs to provide a sobering perspective on the role of brands in people's lives. In a statement that may sound cringey to the layman but enlightening to marketing professionals, Jeremy Bullmore says, “Most of the time, people either don't like things very much, or they like them quite a bit. And the things that they like quite a bit, they like quite a bit, so they tend to buy them quite often.” So how do we ensure that our brands are both quite liked and bought quite often?
The Ehrenberg-Bass market-based theory of assets suggests two areas of focus: psychological availability and physical availability.
Mental availability: Brands need to be constantly reminded by category buyers to increase the likelihood of repeat purchase. This transforms the brand from “the last red one the kids loved” to a deep and wide associative network that connects brand assets with category cues. Consumers are “cognitively frugal” and need help recalling memories of past brand experiences. Brands must become “easy to recall.”
Physical AvailabilityBrands must be as visible and easy to buy as possible. This means more stores, more shelf space, visibility both offline and online, longer opening hours, more payment options, etc. A positive memory for a brand can never overcome the friction created by the product being difficult to buy. “This is essential because buyers do not have strong preferences even for brands they are loyal to; they are willing (and regularly do) to buy substitutes from within their repertoire,” warns Byron Sharpe. Brands must become “easy to find.”
As marketers, we can and probably should aim for loyalty as a form of reciprocity. But the surest way to reap the rewards of this rainbow is usually to not overwhelm consumers with superiority or innovation. The Erlenberg-Bass Institute also found that a third of British consumers' “products of the year” were gone after a year, and half of those were gone after two years.
People aren't loyal to fleeting memories of having tried a brand — which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for observing the rainbow of interactivity — they're loyal to the brands they can think of and can find.
Understanding and implementing these principles will help you align your marketing strategies with real consumer behavior and preferences, rather than relying solely on idealistic notions of brand loyalty and consumer gratitude. This alignment not only fosters a more realistic approach to consumer relationships, it also paves the way for more sustainable brand success.
