Brands with a worldwide presence are always faced with the challenge of maintaining their leads in markets where they are the leaders and catching up with market leaders in regions where they trail. The days of one-way communication via ads are long gone. Today, consumer insights are derived through interaction with an audience on social media, business website, blogs, and forums apart from consumer buying behavior.

Newer opportunities for data gathering have been made possible by powerful online tools. The data can be effectively analyzed for better customer segmentation and relationship management. While this has been happening, consumer expectations to have risen sharply over the years, driven no doubt by attentions showered on their needs by competing brands. And also by the awareness that has been brought about by peer reviews, customer reviews, social media…the internet.

Companies that have been able to extract actionable information from the data available and use it creatively have succeeded in gaining an advantage over the competition. Striving to gain insight from information should always be a priority for businesses that wish to stay ahead of the competition. The insight can help your business meet ambitious targets.

Such insight also throws light on factors that determine customer loyalty and how existing customer loyalty paradigms may be changing. It is an opportunity for your business to identify gaps in customer communication and customer satisfaction and thereby increase your chances of retaining a customer’s loyalty.
If your brand enjoys customer loyalty, it is less vulnerable to the vagaries of economy and changes in tastes. Of course, you have to address customer satisfaction issues at all times, before and after a customer offers his loyalty and business to you. Loyal customers are also enthusiastic evangelists; it means a lot in this day and age of online customer reviews.

If you crack the code on building and retaining customer loyalty, you minimize your exposure to the vicissitudes that govern marketing and sales, especially in the consumer goods sector. Loyalty in the fast-moving consumer goods can be fickle, shifting from one product to another in the span of a day. Consumers usually have a bunch or portfolio of products that they are loyal to. The challenge for marketers is to create space for their products in such portfolios of their prospective customers. In stable markets where consumer preferences are more or less fixed and the population growth is either slow or negative, brands need to make sure that customers loyal to them stay that way and that they poach customers from competitors. Customer loyalty is much more valuable in such markets.

Consumption decisions measured over time can help understand how shifts in loyalty take place. Such studies have taken into account consumer psychology and its evolution over a timespan. Traditional studies; however, cannot track the behavior of individual consumers over a span. Therefore, shifts in loyalty that emerge from such studies are only broad matrices and do not offer insight at a granular level.

To take marketing decisions that can truly influence customer loyalty, you need depth of information along with the spread that traditional research provides. In-depth research would give information on whether the purchaser is indeed the consumer. Knowledge of consumers that stick with the brand enables brands to create marketing strategies to increase their pool of such sticky consumers.

A longitudinal drilling into customer behavior will give you the actual number of sticky consumer over a timeframe, the demographic they belong to, and the reasons put forward for their loyalty. This is a much clearer picture that takes into account the inevitable churn that happens with every brand. A broader analysis of customer loyalty may yield an inaccurate picture of stable loyalty. It is possible to sustain a notion of customer loyalty even with a high degree of churn so long as you keep recruiting new customers. Information on sticky consumers can drive growth. It gives you leverage that you can exercise not just for one but multiple products under a brand and even across brands.

Since a brand’s consumer base is spread across demographics, a vertical drill down to understand sticky consumers will invariably shed light on the pain points that resulted in churn in that segment. You can then take steps to plug churn and improve retention rates. You can create a sturdier strategy to boost overall brand growth.

And it all begins with understanding the sticky consumer.
Insight on sticky consumers lets you plan for the future. As one segment of sticky consumers comes of age, another prospective group is ready. The challenge is to ease this new group into regular brand use. One way to do it is through brand extensions, i.e. by creating bridge categories that can help customers transition to the flagship product. This also helps in tackling churn across various brand categories and loss of customers to competing brands.

Also, within a portfolio of brands of an umbrella brand, some brands will outperform others in terms of ensuring and fostering brand loyalty. Information on which brands attract the most loyal customers allows the company to create a marketing strategy aimed at boosting overall brand stickiness. It will allow you to gently nudge customers to brands within the portfolio and not move to a competing brand. In short, with insight on stickiness, you can manage churn in a much better way.

eHESIVE can help your business understand what the sticky consumer feels about your business, his expectations, and reasons for churn. We can help you achieve deeper penetration across customer segments, avoid cannibalization, and plan effective diversification at minimum costs.