WHY SHOULD I TRUST YOU?

Loyalty and trust are the cornerstones of any human relationship. But these emotional attachments are not limited to human interactions but are also applicable to relationships between brands and their audience. Building a loyal following should be one of the requisites of any company. Loyalty is an extremely potent tool in the marketplace as the cost of retaining a loyal customer is way cheaper when compared to obtaining a new customer. Also, evangelists of your brand will advocate your products resulting in some free marketing and reach.

IS LOYALTY NECESSARY?

Loyalty is a priceless commodity. Businesses want their employees to be loyal to the company. Marketers want loyal and repeat customers to reduce their customer acquisition costs. Generally, loyalty is earned gradually, but there is a simple way in which loyalty can be inculcated in your employees and audience. Researchers at North-Western University and the University of California, Berkeley, led by Hal Ersner-Hershfield found that having subjects visualize alternatives which may have occurred in the history of the company made them more patriotic and loyal to the entity. Similarly, reflecting on the shaky origins of a company made its employees feelings toward the company more positive in nature.

The researchers ran a series of tests to determine the effect of loyalty and its benifits. They asked subjects to reflect on how the United States came into being. Half of the subjects were asked to reflect on what their world would be like if the country hadn’t come into being. (This is called counterfactual reflection.) The other half were told to think about what their world is like because the country did come into existence (factual reflection). The sub- jects told to imagine the “what if the country hadn’t come into existence” scenario demonstrated higher levels of patriotism in subsequent testing than those who reflected on their actual situation.

This principle is not limited only to the feeling of patriotism or loyalty toward one’s own country but can be used in the world of business as well. A similar test that had subjects reflect on the origins of a company showed a significant boost in positive feelings among those who thought about the counterfactual condition, that is, the differences in the world or their own lives had the company not been created. These series of tests show that loyalty plays a vital role in what the audience thinks of a particular entity.

FEDEX AND BLACKJACK:

Most companies have had nervous make-or-break moments in their history. FedEx can be considered as one of the prime examples of such a moment. The company was almost out of cash when its founder Fred Smith flew to a Las Vegas casino in a desperate attempt to generate enough funds to pay all of his employees their month’s salary. (Yes, he won enough hands of blackjack to pay his employees. Today, the firm employs 275,000 people worldwide. Just about every company has some sort of story like that (although perhaps not quite as dramatic), and subtly letting employees think about how different their lives would have been and how they would have been affected if things didn’t pan out like they did.

BRAND FOMO:

The researchers didn’t test this approach, but it seems that employees who may have had a few positive opinions about the company due to some increase in their job satisfaction since being employed, such as promotions, pay increases, home or car purchases, and so on, reflecting on the company’s role in this and, more important, the detriments which the said employee might have faced if he hadn’t joined the company, might result in a higher loyalty quotient toward the company and a positive outlook toward their responsibilities.

PRODUCT FOMO:

Has a customer had a positive experience or received real benefits from interacting with your brand and its products? Has your product helped reduce his or her cost or improved his or her efficiency? Have there been fewer delivery problems than with past vendors? Helping customers visualize alternative scenarios and bad past experiences from their previous brands would be one way to enhance their positive feelings about their relationship with your brand.

But be cautious about this. There are a lot of ways a poorly planned approach to this technique could backfire on your brand. If you call an employee into your office and tell him, “Think about what your life would be like if you weren’t employed by us,” it will probably reflect poorly on you as an individual and their opinion on your company. Similarly, telling a customer, “Imagine how screwed up your manufacturing schedule would be if you were still dealing with your old, unreliable supplier,” won’t come across as positive and professional but would sound smug instead. But, if you avoid the bulldozer approach and are subtle in introducing these alternative scenarios, you will produce a massive boost in terms loyalty and emotion without offending the other person.

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