How Branding Improves Your Customer Loyalty

If customer loyalty can be easily bought, you can expect a swarm of brands lining up the counter.

But true brand loyalty is far from cheap marketing assets. It’s a cash-draining well that needs constant refilling.

That’s why not all brands that aim to acquire loyal customers actually get them. In fact, only a few businesses can confidently say they enjoy such a phenomenon.

Big names like Apple and Nike don’t even have to acquire new customers to ramp up their bottom lines. Although interested people keep popping up, their previous consumers are their saving graces. 

While everyone knows how beneficial brand loyalty is, it’s also common knowledge that it’s challenging to acquire. It demands wide resources, planning, and a good understanding of your customers. But if there’s one part of your business that can guarantee repeat buyers more than anything, it’s branding. 

Here are some tried and tested reasons for how branding properly gets you loyal customers.

Branding Focuses on the Logo

While it’s true that the quality of the product or service tops all reasons for brand loyalty, we cannot deny the fact that it’s also the aesthetics of the brand that draws people in. 

This is the case with most famous brands like Apple and Chanel. A lot of people buy their products solely because of their logo design. To some, it resembles their personality and their identity.

Moreover, some products are status symbols. In those cases, any product will outsell its counterpart solely because of its designs. 

So to improve your brand loyalty, make sure your logo is top of the class. Generic designs cannot guarantee repeat buyers but rather doubtful and inconsiderate customers. Create a cool logo to attract the eye of customers.

Take your logo to the next level. Make it more unique and stunning. And since logos are not the only facets of branding, consider polishing other assets too. Things like fonts, color combinations, and visual hierarchy have a place in your brand remodeling priority. 

Branding Develops the Brand Perception

Brand perception is a vital factor in whether you will have repeat customers. Most people want to purchase something because their friends say good things about it. Or they were urged to go for a brand because they overheard people hyping up their services. Even better, they see positive mentions of the brand on social media platforms.

These positive perceptions will shape the buyer’s purchasing decisions and will ultimately turn them into loyal customers. Nothing beats a good recommendation, especially from people they trust. 

That’s why you put your best foot forward so that anyone who comes in contact with your brand will likely say something positive. And therefore will help you easily market your brand to people that otherwise haven’t heard of you. 

Branding Creates Personality

The key to improving your loyalty numbers is through a wonderful understanding of your target audience. A brand that knows its customers can customize its identity and make it into something that will resonate with its audience. The audience that feels seen and understood is more willing to go out of their way to empty their pocket repeatedly. 

The creation of brand personality is part of branding strategies. Branding processes urge business owners to define their personality, which often consists of age, interests, location, income brackets, traits, emotions, and more. 

If done correctly, such personalities will attract like-minded consumers. It can also elicit positive emotions that are beneficial to the firm. Because consumers purchase mostly from brands that resemble their characteristics, your bottom lines will likely increase. 

How does this work? For example, if you’re an avid player or a fan of basketball, you’re less likely to associate yourself with Chuck Taylor but rather with Nike. Same thing with Mac users. You love Apple because it looks luxurious and high-end, just like how you view yourself. 

This personality-laden branding is key to boosting your repeat buyers. But this can only happen successfully if you narrow your consumer segments and define the personality that sets them apart from other groups. 

Branding Defines Unique Edge

The true purpose of branding is to help your business stand out. It urges the owners and creators to focus on what makes their business really unique. With sound branding systems in place, it’s much easier to define this unique selling point. 

This ability to see the USP dramatically helps improve the uniqueness and edge of a product, service, and other offers. It makes it sellable and marketable to a broader audience with higher chances of repeat buying.

In consumer markets, uniqueness is a sure path to success. Besides, who wants to own something generic? If your brand can guarantee a stand-out product or service, then it has probably secured brand loyalty down the line. 

So if you’re at your branding stages, consider developing your unique identity. Take time crafting a unique brand persona and make sure your entire product lineup, customer service, and aesthetics are centered on this. 

Branding Meets Expectations

A well-prepared brand can successfully meet all expectations of its prospective buyers. Even if the expectations were high, a powerful brand can hit off the mark and satisfy consumers. And what happens if all expectations are successfully met? You guessed it. Customers who are willing to pay for any products you release will continue to patronize you even if your marketing runs dry. 

Meeting expectations, however, is not always easy. Truth is, it can be a messy aspect of branding. In fact, you might not be able to satisfy all customer’s needs and expectations. There will always be lapses and inconveniences. Proper branding will only level the playing field. 

But what part of branding can help you manage the audience’s expectations? We all know that part of branding is customer satisfaction analysis. If a brand understands what satisfies its customers, what product they like the most, and what kind of customer service they would like to receive, it can easily answer these concerns. 

It can be in the form of social media content, Facebook covers, Instagram stories, blog posts, email newsletters, FAQs, products that really solve their problems, and products that embody their ideals and values. These ways certainly help alleviate issues associated with not meeting expectations. And when executed properly, customers are likely to come back. 

Branding Demands Consistency

Branding is all about consistency. Sure, beauty and uniqueness is a true value for this process to work, but consistency is the one that sells. If your logo is minimal, but your website is all over the place, then customers will feel a disconnect in your identity. They can smell it from a mile away.

And there’s nothing more offsetting than inconsistencies. Potential customers might feel your brand doesn’t live up to promises, making it untrustworthy. Of course, this would affect not only your bottom lines but also your likeability and loyalty numbers. 

To prevent this from happening, make sure that you consider consistency when branding. Consistency from the start up until the present situation of your business will retain first customers and turn them into loyal brand followers. 

So how to achieve consistency, you ask? Focus on the aesthetics first, such as the logo, color palette, and font. Create a brand style guideline and make sure everything is based on that. If you think your website does not match your overall brand you can always do a redesign using a web planning template. Then move on to intangible aspects like tone and voice, customer service, and product quality Although there are more facets of a brand that require consistency, these top things are the most important and the ones your customer looks at the most when deciding whether to patronize you or not. 

Branding Develops Inherent Values

All brands should have their inherent values. What are values, you ask? Things that motivate them to propel forward, go further, dive deeper, and get bigger — their true purpose and real meaning in the enterprise world. 

Now imagine if all businesses have no values. All they want to do is nab your hard-earned money month after month. Sad world, right? Values lend companies importance other than earning profits. Branding helps these companies, especially fledgling businesses, define their true values. 

And when you decide to develop your values through branding, your effort will not go to waste. Potential customers love a brand with values so much that they become repeating, loyal followers in time. A good turn out, right? 

Brands with values are more likely to earn the trust of their consumers. That’s because they can see that to these companies, they are more than just piggy banks to break. That their needs and wants are essential hence, the good quality services and products. 

So if you think that loyal customers will dramatically increase your bottom lines, we suggest you develop your brand values if you don’t have one. If there’s existing brand values, then defining them clearly and making them well-known up to the lower end of the business hierarchy will help you win the brand loyalty game. 

Branding Relies Heavily On Quality

Branding is a process that loves quality over quantity. Branding professionals know that to enjoy brand loyalty, you need to level up on the quality of everything: from customer service to marketing collateral. A high-quality brand can turn visitors to audiences, audiences to buyers, and of course, buyers to repeat consumers. 

With branding, you can improve the quality of your assets. Because branding’s goal is for a brand to stand out, part of this process includes the creation of high-quality things — be it the free logo, the slogan, or the social media campaigns. Branding is the process of ensuring that everything the brand churns out has a high chance of performing well in the online marketplace, because if otherwise, the brand will come out common rather than unique. 

Here are some of the reasons why high-quality assets result in brand loyalty:

• It builds trust. 
• It boosts recommendations
• It decreases customer complaints
• It makes everything beautiful

Are all these enough for you to focus on quality performance, products, and services? If not, here is some more: according to MIT Sloan Management Review, high-quality products are guaranteed to improve profitability.

ROI shoots up once defects and field failures are reduced, leading to lower manufacturing and service costs. 

Do you know what your customer service NPS currently is? If not, start measuring to get a baseline – and start improving it.

Branding is A Killer System

Proper branding demands a killer system. Having a system that works enables all companies — new and old — to have faster customer service, faster product sell-out, and, our main goal here, increased repeat buyers. 

You might wonder, how can branding improve your systems? Most people think that branding is all about designs and aesthetics but branding is more than that. It’s also proper allocation of resources so that the system is efficient and effective. 

For instance, when you’re creating social media content for brand campaigns, you pick the perfect avenue where your content will be published. This guarantees that although you have limited platforms, your resources will be directed to a few contents enabling higher quality and 

Improved speed. 

Another example is customer service. One of the most effective branding strategies is the improvement in customer response and concerns. A well-placed system, like designing FAQs, chatbots, and adequately training direct stakeholders will result in a likable brand. A favorable brand will be the top choice of customers. And when that happens, consumers will flock to you as their preferred business partner with repeated transactions. A great deal just by focusing on branding and system improvements. 

To Wrap it Up — Bonus: Branding Includes Surprises!

While branding loves consistency, there’s always room for a few surprises. And when I say surprises, I mean those instances that rock your customers because of how weird, incongruent, and unaligned they are. 

If done correctly, it could make you stand out, develop your fun persona, instigate social media mentions, or even become viral. 

As you know, in branding, good publicity can boost your marketing efforts, generate organic traffic, and make your brand more well-known. 

By peppering some surprising attributes, events, images, and stories, your customers might see you as the new baddie in the game — something they might love to try. And if you’ve set up your systems right, prepared a high-quality offer, tapped on your inherent values and your customers’ personality, and have consistently met all your consumers’ expectations, then you’ve prepared your landscape well for a good number of loyal customers — now and in the future. 

Written in collaboration with BrandCrowd.

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