Find out what your customers value and use your brand to seize market opportunities.
Choice overload
The rapid proliferation of products, services, information resources and entertainment options in recent years has inundated consumers with choice. Faced with choice overload, consumers are choosing to be loyal only to certain brands that deliver the greatest apparent value or that truly capture their imagination.
Among companies that have developed and preserved exceptionally strong brands in recent years are Google and Apple. These companies have proven to be effective at winning battles for “ownership” of the customer.
Building brand loyalty
In recent years, Google has unseated previous internet search engine champions through a combination of: innovation, expanded service offerings (e.g., maps, email), performance and reputation.
Search engines bring you the content you want. But by doing this well, they win your loyalty and become as important to you as the content providers themselves.
Google has excelled at continually providing the best search experience it can — this is the science behind its brand and what enables it to experiment with expanded consumer and business offerings.
This shows that in search, actual performance or the perception of performance by the customer has become the most important factor in determining brand loyalty — and the same thing is beginning to happen in an ever-widening number of other industries.1
In the music industry, where artists dominated the customer relationship instead of producers, distributors or retailers, there has been a well-documented shift in the distribution value chain away from the music industry labels to digital music providers.
Apple is now the primary provider of digital music devices (iPods) and legally downloadable digital music through iTunes. Apple captured an emerging customer desire and developed a solution through investment in technology, partnerships and brand building. The company ultimately secured its position by demonstrating significant apparent value to music listeners — and by capturing their imagination with superb design.2
Embedding customer knowledge into your business
Companies that build and protect their brands can cultivate relationships of trust with customers. This enables them to tap into the collective knowledge of their customers to help:
- Guide product development
- Reshape business models
- Refine market timing
In this way, companies with strong brands will be better placed to seize market opportunities and bring their customers with them as they introduce new products and services, or enter new markets.
Lessons learned
Paramount among the lessons learned is that customer loyalty is not static. Service usability and excellent execution are critical in preserving loyalty. The play for who owns the customer is changing constantly based on innovation, market shifts, new market entrants, reputation and — most importantly — brand performance.
1 “Google @10,” The Globe and Mail, 6 September 2008, via Dow Jones Factiva.
2 “The DECADE of STEVE,” Fortune, 23 November 2009, via Dow Jones Factiva.
