The Biggest Opportunity to Create Brand Loyalty with Young Designers

Brand loyalty — it can be a tricky thing to develop, maintain, and nurture. As the consumer of a brand, it’s rather second nature: You have natural instincts that help you gravitate toward one product or another. But as a brand manager, how do you identify what makes your product resonate with different groups? And how do you make your product attractive to those subsets?

At ThinkLab, we see a direct parallel between brand loyalty in the interiors industry and mentorship. But by mentorship, we don’t just mean professional development in a peer setting within an organization. Mentorship, in this capacity, refers to teaching the youngest subset of designers how to identify attributes that make products appealing and how to venture into unknown brands and product categories, confidently and successfully.

According to McKinsey research, three out of four consumers are likely to try new brands during the pandemic, while ThinkLab research suggests only one in three designers are likely to do the same. Digging deeper, ThinkLab research indicates the younger generations, namely Gen Z or millennials, are less likely to specify products new to them than their more experienced counterparts are. But this varies by age: ThinkLab research suggests baby boomers are 3 percent less like to experiment with new products, while Gen Z are 9 percent and millennials are a staggering 32 percent less likely to test the unknown waters. This could be, in part, due to hesitation on behalf of less experienced specifiers who may question unfamiliar products. They go for the tried-and-true options that are safe. And they may need the guiding hand of one of their more experienced peers to lead them toward the features they should be looking for in new specification choices — something that undoubtedly holds unique challenges in our new, digital world — or the support of a sales team educated on what motivates these young specifiers.

So how do emerging brands get in front of this subset of designers? How do they become a tried-and-true product? We sat down with Jon Otis, professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Design, to gain a better understanding of the youngest designers in our field, Gen Z and millennials, to understand what motivates them and how to best capture their attention. His insights help paint a picture of the mentorship young designers need — both from inside their organization and outside it — to feel confident to expand their specification tool kit. Read the full article here.