Take a moment to think about a few of your favorite brands—the ones you go out of your way to do business with, or the ones you simply admire for a specific attribute or mission.
What sets them apart, and why are you so loyal to them? It probably has a lot to do with the quality of those brands’ products, the experience they provide, or the values they present.
Now, put on your marketing hat and consider brand admiration from a different perspective. Specifically, ask yourself these questions:
As a consumer, how much more valuable are you to a particular brand than a less passionate customer?
Do you spend more with that brand and buy from it more often?
How willing are you to forgive mistakes or embrace new products?
How frequently do you talk about, share, and promote your favourite brands?
Truthfully, it’s easy to make qualitative assumptions about the value of our brand admiration (“of course loyal customers are worth more!”); but, as any good brand manager or custodian knows, you don’t get paid to make qualitative assumptions. Every business pays its employees, especially those directly involved in marketing, to evaluate and understand the direct business impact of every investment it makes.
So, the question that needs to be answered is this: Just how valuable is brand admiration, and what impact does it have on a brand’s bottom line?
What Research Reveals About the Tangible Value of Brand Admiration
Thankfully, marketing experts have already taken care of the research for us.
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In their ground-breaking book, Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love, marketing researchers C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Andreas B. Eisingerich share decades of research that make a compelling argument for the enduring value of investing in becoming an admired brand.
Specifically, the authors found that brand admiration tends to propagate distinct human behaviours that drive three clear business benefits: unwavering brand loyalty, passionate brand advocacy, and enhanced cost efficiencies and stronger market position.
1. Unwavering Brand Loyalty
Going through Brand Keys’ annual Customer Loyalty and Engagement Index, it is not particularly shocking that the companies with the highest customer loyalty rankings are also some of the world’s most admired brands.
According to a study on brand admiration by Stanford University, globally beloved brands benefit from the following:
Repeat purchase patterns over competing brands
A willingness by customers to pay a premium (you may consider products like Apple, Bang & Olufsen, Rolls Royce etc)
An unwillingness to substitute—even if a lower- alternative is easily accessible
These benefits are illustrated in a study by Cornell University on the impact of loyalty in the hotel industry—a market where loyalty is hard to achieve but easy to quantify. According to the study, when hotel chains were able to enroll frequent customers in loyalty programmes, it resulted in a 50% increase in revenue for enrolled vs. ‘unenrolled’ frequent customers.
2. Passionate Brand Advocacy
Brand admirers aren’t just more willing to buy more from their favorite companies, they’re also more likely to talk about, share, and promote those brands at a much higher rate than “average” consumers.
At scale, those behaviours make it far easier (and cheaper) for brands to raise awareness, market new products or services, and recruit new brand admirers—and all these compound brand admiration.
3. Enhanced Cost Efficiencies and Stronger Market Position
When people are more loyal to a brand (and, thus, more likely to advocate on its behalf), the business will naturally spend less to market its products and raise awareness for new offerings. It will also have higher employee morale and lower employee turnover, both of which have a powerful and direct impact on a company’s bottom line.
To understand the direct impact on a business, consider how much a 20% drop in customer acquisition costs, or how a 20% improvement in employee retention, would affect a business. What would those cost savings and improved cost efficiencies allow the business to do that its competitors can’t afford to match?
Is A Brand Capitalizing on the Potential of Brand Admiration?
When the quantifiable link between brand admiration and business results is taken into account, it is safe to posit that brand admiration just might be the most desired status of brand health.
When a business is able to build a framework that takes customers well beyond just liking or trusting it—to a point where they unabashedly defend and forgive it—every Key Performance Indices (KPI) begins to compound. Instead of incremental market gains, the brand will record exponential improvement in every important area of business—from partner and vendor alliances to customer and talent acquisition.
Last line: If you cultivate and foster brand trust correctly, your company won’t need to constantly throw piles of money at rebuilding and repairing trust with customers. Instead, that trust will be part and parcel of who you are as a business, and it will become one of the driving forces behind why people choose to associate with your brand.
