Caring for Customers.
Brand loyalty is an even more precious commodity in the current world we live in. Our R&D over the past couple of years has suggested increased rates of switching across categories. It’s also highlighted the increased need to build emotional connections with consumers. If brands don’t care, customers will leave. Chris Hall, our Commercial Director, shares some more thoughts about how brands can build closeness with customers through caring, and the implications when brands get it wrong.
The short and mid-term impact of the pandemic has been the increased expectation that brands should demonstrate what they are doing to support people through the crisis. Brands that share values with their customers and make efforts to connect are successfully building long term attitudinal loyalty.
Whatever the lasting impact of brands’ efforts to ‘do the right thing’, brands need to keep in mind that it is imperative to excel in delivering the tangible, day-to-day parts of the customer experience too. Get the service/product quality wrong and customers won’t stick around. Factors including convenience, effort and critically, value are coming under scrutiny – even more so given the increased cost of living in 2022.
But brands need to do more to actively grow – to build advocacy and increase market share. Building closeness, through personalisation and rewarding loyalty are more important than ever.
And this applies to caring for customers too. Brands can’t afford to send the wrong signals here.
One recent example that falls into this camp is Land Rover. Recently, a customer in the Midlands had a problem with her Range Rover, resulting in it bursting into flames and exploding in her driveway. By this time, luckily, she had made it into the house and escaped unharmed.
A very serious incident and a potential PR nightmare for Land Rover. But bad went to worse, with the customer claiming a complete lack of support from the brand after the incident, with Land Rover supposedly shifting action to the insurer, rather than taking control.
An already unhappy customer has now been in the press and on national radio blaming Land Rover for their lack of care. She has claimed that Land Rover have tried to brush off the incident, even claiming that it could have been weather induced. On the radio interview, the interview ended with the comment ‘If they don’t care, no-one will buy their products”. Unsurprisingly, this has now been picked up and shared more widely – and globally - on Twitter.
For Land Rover, one customer’s feeling of a lack of care and responsibility from the brand has escalated into negative word of mouth to many. The opposite of closeness, and advocacy for the brand will therefore have suffered.
Chris Hall, Commercial Director, Motif
