Developing Customer Loyalty

Bonding customers to your brand is the long-term goal of your organization. When you want to understand and strengthen your brand bonds, CustomerLink is the approach that provides the next evolution in customer loyalty research. Loyalty research has evolved from an internal operations focus on customer satisfaction to an external marketing focus on customer retention.

Heeding the cry for loyalty measures to also evolve so that the internal actions indicated by customer satisfaction research link more strongly with external market outcomes, M/A/R/C has reframed the measurement of loyalty. Leveraging learning from our Assessor® new product forecasting system, we now employ relative brand preference as the ultimate measure of loyalty because it embodies customer choice and is proven as the best predictor of changes in future market share. CustomerLink’s analytic framework provides an integrated and reliably predictive context for improving products and services in order to strengthen brand bonds and resulting customer loyalty.

The critical first step is identifying customer needs that can be used as the foundation for evaluating the brand’s performance. We employ a proven interviewing and analysis technique — CustomerVoices — originally developed at MIT that ensures the full gamut of needs relevant to both customers and prospects are addressed. The interviewing approach is experiential and enables the incorporation of meaningful and relevant customer language in all subsequent research and marketing communication.

Once this foundation is built, the work turns to understanding the brand’s competitive positioning in terms of loyalty and growth opportunity. An understanding of competitive positioning sets the stage for evaluating brand performance and identifying loyalty drivers as measured by relative brand preference. The CustomerLink Simulator helps marketers and managers alike choose which improvements are worth pursuing by simulating the impact of changes in brand performance upon future market share.

Evaluating Performance and Setting Priorities

The utility of loyalty research rests on its ability to reveal the interactions that exist between elements of the brand experience, identifying those that are drivers of loyalty, and enabling the construction of improvement strategies that will drive positive changes in market performance.

Customers evaluate brand performance on key attributes of product, service, and price. Extending the measurement of loyalty to brand preference is at the heart of our performance measurement. Using our proprietary brand preference measure, a roadmap is created for understanding the dynamics of brand performance and identifying how improvements will drive positive change in market share. This helps determine which improvements warrant future investment.

Knowing Where to Invest

Having now created a strong link between improvement actions indicated by the research and changes in market performance, we can simulate the actual impact that these actions will have upon market share.

Once the key improvement attributes of brand experience are identified and the interdependencies between elements are understood, the CustomerLink Simulator can be employed to predict the impact of successful improvements in specific element combinations on market share.

The key to creating strong brand bonds with customers is continually improving on those aspects of the brand experience that drive brand preference. With CustomerLink, management teams can anticipate the needs of their customers and plan for staying in a share-gaining position.

For case studies, or a proposal featuring a CustomerLink solution, please at 800.884.MARC (6272).