North Wales Management School - Wrexham University

Be the brand consumers want to buy from

Posted on: June 18, 2019
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Be the brand consumers want to buy from

People don’t choose to buy from brands on a whim. There’s always a reason behind their decision. For a consumer faced with a glut of choice – it’s estimated that we see up to 10,000 brand messages a day – and their own rising expectations, the differentiator often comes down to experience.

Salesforce’s ‘State of the Connected Customer’ report reveals that 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services; 76% expect companies to understand their needs and expectations; and 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.  Putting customers’ needs first therefore has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.

As the scope of customer expectations shifts, not only do brands need to deliver engaging marketing, efficient customer journeys and faultless aftercare, they must also prove they have the best interests of their customers in mind. Salesforce’s research finds 95% of customers say they are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust.

There are multiple ways to make brands appealing and drive customer loyalty, without jeopardising the bottom line. Here are three for starters –

  1. Add value
    Consumers today are savvier than ever, and they’re sceptical of brands that are overly promotional. Instead, they favour brands that focus on being helpful and offering value. Instead of thinking about marketing to a mass of people, paint a picture of what your target consumer is like and think about how to attract that one person. Uncover their pain points and their needs. What problems can you solve for them? Find the crossover between what your customers want and what your brand provides.
  1. Don’t tie customers in
    You might think the best way keep a customer loyal is to tie them in, but in fact the opposite is true. Everyone hates to feel trapped, and if a customer stays because they’ve no other choice, it doesn’t say a lot about your company. Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Spotify – all make cancelling at any time simple. Because the risk is low, more people sign up, increasing profits. It’s the same with phones; the pay as you go people generate more profits. Locking people in comes at a price. Great marketing isn’t just about attracting customers to your brand, it’s about serving them better than your competitors do so they stay.
  1. Be personal
    To get people to care about your brand, you need to make it more personal; more human. People like people, and they want to know that there is a human person behind the brand they’re following. LV staff, for example, are trained to pick up on instances where delivering a bit of extra consumer care is on-brand. The insurer has recently made gestures such as sending a movie night hamper to a customer recovering from cancer and going to great lengths to replace an album another customer had lost in a fire. If you want people to care about your brand, you need to show that you care about them.

Those who bring customers on board and keep them there by offering an exceptional customer experience maximise their chances of good business performance in the long term. Customer loyalty and therefore businesses’ success are now heavily influenced by having consumer’s best interests at heart.

If you’re interested in the psychology of why consumers buy from certain brands and are looking to progress your career in strategic marketing and brand engagement, Wrexham University offer an online Masters of Business Administration (MBA) Marketing. The course gives working professionals the opportunity to transform their career prospects by developing a robust and well-rounded set of business skills and a deeper understanding of marketing.

Industry-led and career-centric, the programme is built for career enhancement across a wide range of sectors in the modern-day work environment and develops the key skills required of senior marketers, including strategic marketing, integrated communications planning, creativity, innovation and an understanding of consumer behaviour. It also covers key business disciplines including finance and human resource management and develops practical and theoretical business leadership skills.

It’s 100% online, and with six start dates a year, you can start whenever you are ready. There are flexible payment options and postgraduate government loans to cover the full programme cost, for those eligible.

To learn more or to apply, visit https://online.wrexham.ac.uk/mba-marketing/