Creating brand loyalty and trust in 2022
Over the past 10 years, consumers’ posture in terms of brand loyalty and trust has evolved significantly.
At its core, the concept of brand loyalty can be quite simple. You build a relationship with a consumer, you prove your value and the value of your product (or service) and the probability that they will switch to another brand becomes much more unlikely.
However, the reality is much more complex, and it evolves from year to year.
For example, in a study cited in an article by Daniel Todaro (Brandingmag), today’s younger generations place a high value on discounts and promotions, but at the same time mention that a brand’s ethics and values are vital elements in their choices.
Content is therefore becoming an important and crucial element in the tools that today’s marketers must have. It allows to position the brand, to take the time to explain its roots, its origins, its values, its ethics, its posture, and its way of doing business.
And this content is even more important in a world where brands rise and fall VERY quickly. In the same article mentioned above, Todaro gives some examples of D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) brands that have had a meteoric rise in awareness and at the same time, a few months or years later, find themselves in a strong dip of interest from its audiences.
It is in this reality that you need to build a content library that answers quickly and efficiently the questions of the audiences that are in contact with your brand.
“Who is this brand? Should I trust it? I’d never heard of them before, but they seem to be quality products…”
Over the past 2 decades, digital platforms have come to shake up the brand building process and we are in an era where the biggest brands are sometimes (and maybe even often) seen by consumers as being on par with smaller, emerging boutique brands.
And these consumers have the same expectations from both. They want to know about the brand, what it stands for, how it contributes to society, where it comes from and where its products are made, etc.
And it’s not just the “digital natives” who think this way. It’s a thinking that cuts across all generations. Consumers want to be better informed, do more research and go a little further in their thinking about the choices they make with certain brands.
This process is essentially very human, very organic and personal to each individual, which it always has been, although strongly supported by digital platforms, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
The end of Daniel Todaro’s (Brandingmag) article sums it up:
According to author Maurice Franks, “Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart.”
Our teams at Toast work daily to create, design and produce content that puts the very values and core of brands front and center. Let us know if you’d like to go further with yours.