By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

I noted recently that it is important to distinguish brand loyalists from simple brand users, even heavy brand users.  Loyalists have a special relationship with your brand and are key to understanding a brand’s identity.

But, how do you identify these loyalists?  Here are five behaviors that are worth developing in your customers because they are sheer signs of a heightened bond with your brand.  And they are qualities to look for when you want to investigate your brand’s essence with those most in touch with it.

So, you know you have a brand loyalist when…

• She talks about your brand and recommends it to friends.

This is the classic definition of a loyalist.  If you want to talk to a true partisan of your brand, ask her if she has recommended it to someone in the past month.

• She uses your brand in unique ways.

I recently read some questions on the web from women complaining they could not find a particular kind of Kraft cheese.  They seemed quite upset.  The cheese was essential to a number of recipes they made.  A true brand loyalist not only loves your brand for what it is; she also loves what she can do with it.  Consumers who have these alternate uses for your brand have integrated it much more deeply into their lives and identity.

• She really “knows” your brand.

A brand loyalist really knows your brand.  When I have wanted to talk with NBA fans, I made sure they watched a certain number of games every week.  But, I also asked them to name the two teams in last year’s finals and four teams in the Eastern Conference.  It was always amazing to me how many “fans” who watched a couple of games a week could not answer those questions.  True Rice Krispie loyalists would know the names of the three signature characters.  True Heinz ketchup loyalists would know in what colors other than red the product has been available.

• Your brand is part of her family’s rituals and traditions.

Does she set out milk and cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve or does she leave a bottle of Coca-Cola with a snack?  When a true loyalist describes a family event, she includes the brand name in her story.

• She “owns” your brand.

The true NBA fan wears apparel with the logo of his favorite team.  But it is possible to “own” many brands.  A true Kraft Singles loyalist brings them home from the grocery store and puts them in a blue “Red and Ned” Kraft Singles box in her refrigerator.  A true Starbuck’s fan drinks her favorite coffee from a Starbuck’s mug.

To be a loyalist is to take charge of the brand.  A true brand loyalist defines the brand and the experience as much as any sophisticated positioning effort.  Marketers have always developed “clubs” and the like to encourage an affinity with brands.  What is remarkable now is that social media is essential to this effort and makes it so much easier for the consumer to wrest control of the brand from the marketer.  It is truly the age of the loyalist.

At C+R, we are continually looking for new definitions of brand loyalty and ways for the marketer to find these true loyalists.  Let us find yours.

—-

I have been talking recently about metaphors and how better storytelling can make our insights more compelling.  I don’t believe that Kurt Vonnegut was ever in the position of presenting a segmentation analysis, but his advice is worth considering.  I think I always want “someone to root for,” whether I am reading a novel or an analysis of a series of ethnographies.  Or, at least I should.

By Robert Relihan, Senior Vice President

One of the most difficult experiences for a focus group moderator is to be in a room with eight people who are supposed to be “loyalists” of a particular brand and discover that most could care less.  The assumption, of course, was that anyone who was a heavy user had to have an affinity for the brand.  So, you made sure that everyone purchased the brand in the past month and had purchased the brand three times in the past six months; they were very heavy users.

But they stared at you blankly when you tried to discuss what the brand stood for or what it meant to them.  The fact is, to develop a meaningful understanding of a brand’s essence, you can’t simply talk to users; you have to talk to people who are passionate about the brand.

So, here are four things to remember when looking for your true (blue) customers

• Users are not always loyalists.

This is the most obvious point.  When you need to talk to or understand people who are passionate about you brand, don’t be coy.  Don’t create elaborate usage algorithms.  You need to be assured that they do use your brand, but it is more important to ask them, “Is this your favorite brand?”

And, a corollary might be the usage is not affinity.  Efforts to build loyalty, such as loyalty programs, can stimulate and reinforce usage, but they do not necessarily build affinity and engagement.

Finally, loyalty and affinity may be as much a feature of the category as it is of your brand.  Coke and Pepsi have spent years and fortunes building up the notion that it is important to be loyal to one or the other.  How could I not be a Coke or Pepsi loyalist?  In effect, you have to be passionate about soft drinks before you can be a Coke or Pepsi loyalist.

• Loyalty is a disposition.

Some consumers seem more disposed to being passionate about the brands they use.  They want to engage with them.  They derive satisfaction from the simple act of choosing a brand and feeling it is “theirs.”

• Loyalists bring as much to your brand as the brand gives to them.

As much as marketers like to see themselves as charting a brand’s essence, users have often been in the driver seat.  In the years of Honda’s rise as a major automotive brand in the US, it crafted an image as a solid, reliable car.  Yet, when I talked with Honda owners, I was always struck by how solid, reliable and careful they were.  How could a car not be reliable when it was driven by such owners?

• Look to their youth.

Loyalty to your brand does not come out of nowhere.  If it is deep, it has been there for a long time.  As a child I remember watching 20^th Century on CBS television. It was sponsored by Prudential Insurance.  The Rock of Gibraltar will always be in the back of my head when I think about my insurance.

If you are really looking to find your loyalists, you might well discover that they have had a relationship with your brand long before they actually purchased it.  A large number of Porsches are driven by people who have wanted to own one since they were twelve.  Ask the question, “What are your first memories of a brand?”  If they can’t go back into their past, they probably aren’t a true loyalist.

This all seems to point to the importance of social media in building a brand and engaging loyalists.  Social media give loyalists an arena to engage with brands, to define both themselves and the brand.  But, there is a trap in social media for marketers.  Recent research suggest that most individuals “friend” retailers on Facebook to get deals.  That is, social media encourages usage.  Does it create engagement and bonding; is it a two-way street?  That is what social media must do to encourage loyalty.

At C+R we are ready to help you understand your “loyal” customers and how to stimulate their engagement with you.

By Walt Dickie, Executive Vice President

One of the advantages of sticking around an industry for a long time is that you have a decent chance to have known someone who left a mark on its development. I was lucky enough to have known Saul Ben-Zeev, one of the guys who developed the focus group as a marketing research tool. I went to work for Saul in 1978, fresh out of graduate school, and I worked beside him as a junior analyst, then a senior colleague, and then, eventually, as a partner in the business.

I say that Saul was, “one of the guys” because focus groups, like most things, came about because several people were working with similar ideas at about the same time, and, in this case, all of them contributed to the “group depth interview,” as focus groups were then known.

Groups were developed from the “focused” one-on-one interviews that were pioneered by Robert Merton and Patricia Kendall in the mid 1940s. The depth, or focused, technique was applied to groups for therapeutic purposes in the 50s, when therapy groups, or T-groups, became a standard tool for psychologists.  Saul, a product of the University of Chicago psychology department, was familiar with the technique and was one of several practitioners who worked to re-purpose group interviews for MR starting in the late 50s, when Creative Research, the predecessor to C+R, was founded.

The motive behind “group depth interviewing,” for both psychology and marketing, was mining for insights. And a great deal of serious thought was given on the academic side to the nature and quality of the “insights” that could be discovered. It was something Saul had spent a great deal of time thinking about, both as a student and a research professional.

So it may seem surprising that I’ve never known anyone in the business who put less stock in “insights” than Saul. He was particularly tough on what he called “gurus” who traded in “insight” without the benefit of rigorous analysis or meticulously constructed argument. And he was equally dismissive of those focus group moderators – several of whom we hired over the years – who felt their wealth of “insights” made up for their poor analytic skills. “Insights,” Saul said many times, “are a dime a dozen.”

What cost much more than a dime, and was the only truly worthwhile goal in Saul’s mind, was the ability of closely reasoned logic to instill a sense of confidence in the reader of a report, specifically, the confidence to make a decision.

What Saul realized a half-century ago is something that the MR industry seems to struggle with, learning and re-learning. Most marketing research is conducted because someone has to make a decision. A team will have to align around that decision, argue for it, and support it through a process involving intense scrutiny and, often, intense pressure from other teams to take a different course.

The industry seems to have learned that no one in business today needs more data, but the blogosphere seems to be all over the idea that they all need “insight.” Saul will be 86 this summer, and he doesn’t come around the office very much anymore, but every time I hear that a client is “starving for insight” I can hear Saul’s voice dismissing the thought.

Dictionaries say “insights” are intuitive and that they reveal some deep truth or essence. Saul certainly recognized that clients needed deep truths, and he delivered them – week after week, report after report – over a long, distinguished career. I went to many presentations with him, and saw the way his clients idolized him. And I can tell you without hesitation that the insights poured out of his pen (or pencil – he never really did get comfortable with a keyboard).

The thing about insights is that they feel deep and intuitive when you hear them and you’ve got the context that they fit into ready in your mind. The key fits the lock, turns, and suddenly, you get it! Without that context, that set up, an insight doesn’t hold up. You may feel its rightness in your gut, but you’ll have difficulty getting your team to align behind it and even more defending it. (It’s more than interesting to look at some famous insights when you’re a bit removed from the right context; often they’re not much more than gibberish without the support structure. “The medium is the message.” “Business is like the Beatles.”)

For an insight to be insightful, the audience has to be ready to get it. And for one to have an impact, they have to be able to get others to get it, even in the face of opposition. And for that, as Saul taught all of us who worked with him, you need to provide the supports.

Maybe one reason that clients feel starved for insights is that they’ve seen too many that were nothing but intuition; insights that evaporated at the slightest hint of a challenge. Or maybe they’ve seen too many tortured arguments that never got down to the deep level where insight lies.

Clients are starved for insights wrapped in a well thought-out supporting structure.

Personally, I think this was one of the many things Saul right. What’s really needed is an analyst who has the experience to understand the decision to be made, who carefully works through how what’s been learned relates to the issues that drive the decision, who can then find insights that will feel deep and intuitive. Anything less really isn’t worth a dime.