If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude

What drives engagement and customer loyalty for your brand? Wait, I’ll make the question easier. What drives engagement and loyalty for the category in which your brand competes?

I thought this an appropriate question because we’ve just finished Wave 1 of the 2007 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index and we’ve noticed that most of the category drivers in the 55 categories we’ve tracked since 1997 have changed substantively since last year.

“Category drivers” – and the category and customer values and attributes and factors and benefits that make up the individual components of the category drivers – describe how consumers view a category, compare offerings in a category, and, ultimately, how they engage with one brand versus others. Properly configured, category drivers will tell you what consumers will do – not what they say they’ll do, which are two really different things if you’re keeping score by counting your sales and profits. If consumers do engage with a particular brand, that means that they believe that the brand will better meet or exceed the expectations they have for the category – and, of course the category drivers that define the category. When you are able to do that you end up with extremely loyal customers.

Some of the category drivers have become more important than others. For some the levels of expectations consumers have for them have increased (they never ever decrease, although in the spirit of full disclosure, they seem to be leveling out after 10 years of mushrooming!), or for some there have been changes in the values and attributes that are the components, the bits and pieces that actually make up the individual drivers. So everything you thought you knew about your category and brand just changed (again).

I raised the issue of whether you know what your category’s category drivers are, because most companies don’t. That may be a bit harsh. In fairness, I’m pretty sure that most companies think they do, but given the complexities of the 21st century marketplace, and the existence of “bionic” consumers in the marketplace, and the increasing complexity of media and cross-media consumption, most of the time they really don’t.

Most companies think they do because it’s likely that they have relied on some form of stated importance ratings or traditional conjoint analysis, a multivariate statistical technique that analyzes preferences for various combinations of attributes. The key word in that description is “attributes.” Conjoint analysis can be very helpful in determining which combination of attributes – generally category characteristics and product features – are most preferred by target audiences and how they “group” together. It’s an extraordinarily appropriate approach for situations where a strong case can be made for mostly rational decision-making. And therein lies the problem.

First, welcome to the 21st century, where product and brand that managed to actually survive the erratic decades of the 1980’s and ‘90’s arrive at this point in time doing everything pretty much the same. Which is why products and services that used to be bona fide brands, now are looking more and more like commodities. Think of them as “Category Place Holders,” if you will. Well known but undifferentiated.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, most marketing and research and branding authorities and professional organizations agree that today, consumer engagement, decision-making, and brand loyalty are principally emotionally driven. Rational elements, of course, come into play, but not as much as they did, say, two decades ago, before commoditization reared its ugly head. At Brand Keys we’ve pegged the ratio at 70 percent emotional to 30 percent rational. In some categories it’s more like 85:15. Feel free to argue all you want among yourselves about the actual numbers, but it isn’t 50:50! Not anymore.

So relying on a perfectly good rational technique to “identify” the category drivers of customer loyalty isn’t, perhaps, the best way to amalgamate emotional elements into the process. It certainly can be misleading. It’s one thing for a product loyalty driver to be more “hot” than “cold,” but you tend to run into problems when the value you are looking to gauge is “comforting.” Nobody’s trading off that value for the other side of the scale, which might fairly be viewed as “upsetting.”

That’s why you need to adjust your attitude toward how you consider identifying the category drivers that you are going to use to measure customer loyalty, and consider relying upon emotionally based metrics to do that for you. The good news is that they do incorporate emotional elements into the process. The better news is that as part of the output, it also provides you with the levels of expectations that consumers hold for each driver, which is the “yardstick” your consumers are using, albeit on an unarticulated basis to define how loyal they’ll actually behave toward you. The best news is that customer loyalty correlates highly with positive behavior toward your brand. Think ‘sales,’ ‘more sales’ and ‘profits.’

There’s not a lot you can do about the fact that category drivers change – and will continue to change. That’s marketing fate. The thing is that category loyalty drivers are beginning to change faster and faster and faster. How fast? In the marketing world it’s so speeded up that some companies will only see the present when it’s disappearing.

And that’s a pretty good reason for you to change your attitude toward how your companies and brands identify and measure customer loyalty. If you use properly configured, 21st century drivers, drivers that can clearly identify the shifts that are really occurring in your category, they’ll act as predictive, leading-indicators to how customers will think and engage with and behave toward your category and your brand.

If it helps, think of those shifts as the process by which the future will invade your corporation. If that doesn’t change your attitude, nothing will!

“Properly configured, category drivers will tell you what consumers will do – not what they say they’ll do”

Robert Passikoff is Founder and President of Brand Keys, Inc, (www.brandkeys.com). He the author of the best-selling book, Predicting Market Success: New Ways to Measure Customer Loyalty and Engage Consumers with Your Brand (Wiley 2006). He can be reached at robertp@brandkeys.com