How Brands Can Turn Customer Experience into Consumer Loyalty

Over the past months, I’ve made it a habit of counting the number of times people sigh as they enter elevators.  You can almost guarantee that someone will exhale deeply as they rush through the doors in the last second. Out of the last 50 rides, every third person entering the elevator had a sigh. I’ve also started counting how many times I hear them coming from cubicles and desks as I visit clients. One day, I counted 52 sighs around me.

The world is suffering from stress and a sigh, a subtle cry for help, seems to be our last resort for a short-lived relief between assignments, deadlines and that endless stream of emails, messages and duties we all have piling up to our necks as we try to convince ourselves that we’re on top of it all. Really, we haven’t felt in control of our lives in many years.  

 In the past, we were able to place a last period in a sentence and wrap up one job, to move on to something entirely different. Instead, our life is packed with commas. We rarely, if ever, are able to say that we’ve fulfilled all our duties before closing down for the day. Try emptying your email inbox during the morning. Feels wonderful, right? But that nice sense of relief completely vanishes as each email you answered generates two responses in your inbox.

 But what does this have to do with brands and businesses in 2016?

Everything.

Here’s what the clever brands and businesses can do in order to tap into this new (and, if I may add, slightly depressing) reality:

1.  Brands needs to offer transitions in our lives. That’s the reason why we sigh while entering the elevator. It is our last transition moment, where we can stop and breathe for a moment. All other transition moments are gone. To what degree is your brand able to create a sense of transition, to create an environment, a stage or a user situation similar to our sigh? If you’re a retailer, does your store offer an environment creating a sense of relief so desperately needed as a pause in our busy life? Or is your brand merely a comma, quickly leading to something else?
2. Brands needs to make us smile and laugh. It is no coincidence that one of the fastest growing entertainment categories is humor, that Comedy Central is thriving and that BuzzFeed’s highest ranking categories all make you smile or laugh. We yearn for it. But if we desire it so deeply, why don't  brands fulfill this need? When was the last time a brand made you laugh the last time or smile? I’ll never forget Virgin Atlantic’s message printed on the bottom of their cute mini plane replicas, found in business class: Pinched from Virgin. This message was typically first discovered when one of your friends picked it up at your dinner party.
3. Brands need to be authentic. So far, most brands have managed to pretend they listen to the consumer, with quick replies on their social media channels, picking up rumors and badmouthing with fast and sincere responses. But this invisible layer of defense mechanism, functioning as almost a bulletproof glass surrounding the brand, has started to become visible to the consumer. Did that brand really mean what it was saying? Were they just nice to me because thousands of people were following my situation? When asking for advice, did they really use the input or was it just another way of making me feel special? 2016 is the year where consumer feedback will truly set a finger print on the organization – not just the marketing and social media department.

About the author:

Martin Lindstrom, a global expert and pioneer in the fields of consumer psychology, marketing, and neuroscientific research, has worked with such brands as McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Nestlé, American Express, Microsoft Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, and GlaxoSmithKline.

 Named one of TIME Magazine’s “World's 100 Most Influential People,” he authored the NY Times and international bestseller "Buyology—Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.” His new book, "Small Data-- The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends," was released in February 2016. In November 2015, Martin was honored by Thinkers50 as number 18 of the world's top business thinkers. 

Get to know Martin better on Twitter, Facebook or at MartinLindstrom.com