How We Become Brand Loyal:

Leeyen Rogers
Jotform Stories
Published in
5 min readMar 6, 2015

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The psychology behind what we like

Once behavioral brand loyalty is strongly manifested in a user, it’s very difficult to change the systematic bias away from the brand. This is exactly what companies are spending millions for: consumers who habitually use the product and have an aversion to switching to a competitor. A person who shops at the same company or uses the same product regularly is “behaviorally” loyal, while a person who tells others how great a product is, or simply feels positively about the brand him or herself internally, is “attitudinally” loyal. They are not mutually exclusive, but of course ideally your brand advocates will also be dropping some cash.

An example of an attitudinally loyal individual is someone who is a huge fan of Maserati cars. They splash photos of the newest models on their screensaver and their cell phone background, they actively tell others about how amazing the products are, and yet perhaps they financially are not at the point where they’re ready to make the purchase. For Maserati, the hope is that their attitudinally loyal fans will eventually convert.

Brand loyalty, once achieved, acts as an effective barrier against brand switching.

Meaningful differences that build brand loyalty are not confined to the product itself, they are instead tied to perception of the brand. The benefits of brand loyalty are longer tenure (or remaining a customer for longer), and lower sensitivity to price. Buyers of luxury goods are often less sensitive than buyers of everyday items. If you’re the type of person who is willing to shell out several thousand dollars for an expensive gadget from a brand that you love, chances are a competitor couldn’t convince you to purchase it from them instead, even though the price tag may be hundred of dollars cheaper.

When you make a purchase, you are not simply buying the product. You are buying a feeling of trust, perceived quality and value, as well as an image.

Perhaps one of the most polarized brand preference battles is between Coke and Pepsi. They both have their die-hard loyalists who will not make the switch, regardless of supermarket sales or new product line launches.

In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. Some of those tasters had claimed to have a strong preference for Coke, and when they were informed that the delicious soda that they had just tasted was in fact Pepsi, their brains did something unexpected. The pleasure signals in their brain immediately dampened.

They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.

They lied, but in their subjective experiences of the situation, they didn’t. Researchers concluded that they really did feel like they preferred Coke after it was all over, and they altered their memories to match their emotions. Even if the pleasure signals in their brain objectively lit up more in reaction to pepsi, their brand loyalty to Coke didn’t waver, and their mental constructs prevented them from registering it. Even to themselves.

A brick-and-mortar store or venue has the benefit of engaging more of the senses. You may be surprised to know that the scents that one experiences at Disneyland are not coincidental. Using large blowers, Disney spritzes different scents in the air, depending on the time of day and the mood that the experience is meant to convey. The music, lighting, decor, and layout all influence the perception of the product, in the hopes of establishing a stronghold in brand loyalty.

For websites and mobile applications, less multifaceted stimulation can be communicated, so upon first contact the user interface is all that you have to go off of. The ease of interaction and the feel of the product combined with any preconceived brand associations add to your emotional feelings about the app or website. For example, if you are a long time happy customer of Bank of America, downloading the mobile app and adding it into your daily routine wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

When Bank of America rolled out their new feature of depositing checks by taking a photo of your check on your phone, I was thrilled! Gone were the dark days of having to drive to the appropriate ATM and manually feed your check into the machine. Also, you were out of luck if you can’t find parking. Or if you didn’t have a pen on you. Because this new feature directly contributed to my happiness (saving me time and aggravation), I probably projected positive feelings onto the company.

When a product or service that you’ve been consistently enjoying and using shuts down, loyal users can experience a sense of loss.

Remember the uproar over the fact that Twinkie’s were set to be discontinued due to Hostess going bankrupt? Twinkies were being sold on eBay and Craigslist like exquisite delicacies! They were selling for hundreds (and in a few shocking cases, thousands) of dollars. Considering that the retail price for a box of 10 Twinkies is roughly $5, this crazy markup illustrates how brand loyalty can really lower the bar to price sensitivity.

Adobe recently announced that their online form builder, FormsCentral, is set to retire this summer. Because a company’s online forms and collections of data can be so integral to their central operations, FormsCentrals swarmed online forums to complain. Many flooded the support teams of their competitors, asking for help with migrating all of their forms and information over. JotForm, a popular online form builder, knew that this was a chance to snag thousands of displaced FormsCentral users and deliver an exceptional experience to hopefully shift them over to be brand loyal to JotForm.

The JotForm engineering team immediately released a custom welcome page for FormsCentral users with a handy tool where they can import their forms to JotForm. This was the entry point. Once on the page, the features of JotForm and FormsCentral were compared in all of the major ways. Once the customer sees that all of their needs that were met with FormsCentral could be met and exceeded at JotForm, the hope is that after several uses born out of necessity, brand loyalty could set in. A superior product does not guarantee brand allegiance, however, as of right now thousands of potentially lucrative users are very much up for grabs.

The message must resonate deeply with the consumer’s sense of self, current or aspirational.

The consumer relates to the brand through shared values. Nike’s slogan “Just Do It,” is something that everyone can relate to, even if in different ways. Whether you wake up in the morning eager to pound the pavement or if you need a little more coaxing to lace up those sneakers, the simple yet encouraging message is catchy and speaks to not making excuses.

Apple’s “Think Different” slogan also encouraged people to have an emotional response to the brand. Representing ingenuity and creativity, these ideals connected with consumers and fostered a psychological bond. Think about the brands that you use and love. What is it about them that makes you feel connected to them? Is there an inexplicable feeling that you just like it, even if there are many competitors that are much of the same?

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