Marketers, Consumers, and the Reciprocity Rainbow

Reciprocity is a powerful human bias. When someone acts kindly with us, we have an impulse to reciprocate with another kind action. We return the favour, because we feel indebted; we feel “much obliged” to do so. Reciprocity is more than a modern, civilised social norm. It is believed to be an evolutionary trait that helped early humans cooperate, increase their odds of survival and ultimately create societies.

?So, very naturally, reciprocity can be found everywhere, in every aspect of our lives, all the time. In marketing, reciprocity is much like a rainbow: its position seems to shift depending on our vantage point.

?RECIPROCITY, AS SEEN BY MARKETERS:

?As marketers, we tend to grow enamoured with the object of our labour. Slide after slide, we create an alternate, distorted world where the comically disproportionate role of the brand overshadows the human insight. Occasionally, we climb too high on the benefit ladder and develop a hero complex: we don’t sell products anymore, we help lives. We convince ourselves that our products or services, unlike others, delight consumers. They fulfill their (un)expressed needs and solve problems they didn’t even know they had in the first place. Reciprocity appears, like a rainbow in the dark, as we assume that grateful consumers will reward our brands with loyalty and advocacy.

?Of course, a superior experience is preferable – and advocacy is more likely to occur when people try new things. But consumers do not ‘switch’ brands like one converts to a new religion and never looks back. If some do, they probably account for a rounding error in any brand growth percentage. Instead, we now know that consumers have divided loyalty: they’re polygamously loyal within a certain repertoire of brands. The more they buy from the category, the larger the repertoire. The less they buy, the more they’re likely to select the category best-seller and limit the size of their repertoire. These are law-like empirical patterns discovered by Andrew Ehrenberg more than half-a-century ago and replicated by his successors at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (and others) ever since.

?“Consumers are busy people. They have hundreds of thousands of brands vying for their attention. […] Therefore, the choice of brand is trivial compared to the decision of whether or not purchase from the category” Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow.

?RECIPROCITY AS SEEN BY NORMAL PEOPLE:

?Normal people give their money in exchange for a product (or a service). Reciprocity occurs when it does what it says on the tin. Whether it just avoids screwing up or delivers a fantastic experience, it’s still in a way just returning the favour.

Somewhere in ‘brand trialists’’ brains, an association is formed between the brand, the product or service and the experience. ‘Kids finished their plate’. ‘The deodorant didn’t stink and didn’t leave any stain on my shirt’. ‘They delivered on time’. That’s a win when positive, but too premature to be called reciprocity.

?LET’S LOOK AT THE SAME RAINBOW, AND MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, WE CAN START HOLDING HANDS

?Marketers should not bank too much on grateful consumers. Sole loyalty is rare. Of course, we should aim for great product experiences, but that’s not enough. It’s like holding the door for a stranger at the grocery store and hoping for a romance in return. The odds are undeniably better than if you slammed the door in their face, but you still have a long way to go.

?To look at the same rainbow as consumers do, we need to meet them where they are, see it from their viewpoint. During my first marketing class, too long ago to be mentioned here, our teacher wrote on the board something that made me yawn and roll my eyes. ‘Marketing is placing consumers at the center of the company’. All students and non-marketing people naturally dismiss this immediately as fluffy platitude. Only as a grown-up marketing professional you realise how few companies even try to understand their consumers. It’s not a platitude, it’s a North Star; a mindset that I would read Mark Ritson describe years later as market orientation.

‘[Market orientation is] the omega of our discipline because it challenges a manager to recognise the fundamental truth that a) consumers are the source of a company’s success, but that b) these consumers inevitably see the world very differently from the employees that work within the company and who devise the strategies aimed at those consumers’ Mark Ritson.

Market orientation’s role is to nip in the bud any preconceived idea on how consumers buy into the category. Research should include actual purchase data (behaviours), not only what consumers feel and think (attitudes). The latter is easier to misread or tweak to confirm a preexisting bias.

?Don’t believe research that says ‘when consumers try our product, they love it and convert’. It happens all the time. So often it could serve as epitaph for half the tombstones in the ever-expanding graveyard of new product failures. It’s just survey participants responding nicely to the nice team interviewing and compensating them. Reciprocity strikes again!

Instead, research might offer some more sobering perspectives on the role of brands in people’s lives. In another statement that is an eye-roller to the layperson but an eye-opener to the marketing specialist, the always insightful Jeremy Bullmore once noted that ‘mostly, people either don’t much like things or do quite like things. And the things they quite like, they tend to buy quite regularly because they quite like them’. How do we then make sure that our brands are quite liked and bought quite regularly?

Ehrenberg-Bass’ market-based asset theory gives us two areas of focus, the now well-known mental and physical availabilities:

• Brands need to be consistently reminded to category buyers to increase the odds of repeat purchase. That’s how you move from “the red one from last time that the kids loved” to a deep and broad network of associations connecting brand assets and category cues. Consumers are ‘cognitive misers’ who need help to retrieve memories of their past brand experience. Brands must become ‘easy to mind’.
• Brands need to be as easy to notice and to buy as possible. That means more stores, shelves, visibility offline and online, longer opening hours or more payment options, among many other things. A positive brand memory will never overcome the friction caused when a product cannot be bought. ‘It’s essential, because buyers do not have strong preferences even for the brands they are loyal to; they are happy to buy alternatives from within their personal repertoires (and they regularly do)’ warns Byron Sharp. Brands must become ‘easy to find’.

As marketers, we can, and perhaps should, allow ourselves to aim for loyalty as a form of reciprocity. But the surest way to be graced with this rainbow is usually not to knock consumers sideways with superiority and innovation. The same Ehrenberg-Bass Institute also showed that a third of the products voted by UK consumers as “Product of the Year” disappeared after a year, and half of them after two.

People won’t be loyal to the fleeting memory of a brand trial. That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition to observe a reciprocity rainbow. People will be loyal to the brands they can think of and they can find.

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Credits: repertoire markets, polygamous loyalty and easy to mind / easy to find (mental and physical availabilities) are concepts developed by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, based on empirical generalisations.