Marketing to Women: Emotional Attachment & Brand Loyalty
Emotions play an important role in a woman’s purchasing decisions and brand loyalty. We don’t always buy a product or service because it’s the best value for our money; many times our choice is driven by an emotional connection.
Brands often develop exclusive campaigns and programs to build and maintain this brand loyalty. The recent success of P&G’s ‘Thank you, Mom’ campaign focused solely on females, is a great example. Brand loyalty now is a two-way relationship; businesses demonstrate their loyalty by listening to the needs and concerns of their consumers, actively engaging and responding to their issues, and using that information to anticipate market trends. In this way, customer loyalty is a mutually beneficial relationship, rather than a one-way flow of products and information.
The 2013 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index® indicates that brands driving the highest level of emotional engagement were ABC (evening news category) with 97 percent, Amazon (online retailers category) with 96 percent, and three companies at 95 percent– Pampers (diapers), Dunkin‘ (packaged coffee), and Subway (quick-serve restaurants). Other category winners include:
• Credit card: Discover, 94 percent
• Automotive: Ford and Hyundai at 93 percent
• Luxury cosmetics: Clinique, 93 percent
• Natural food stores: Whole Foods, 93 percent
• E-readers: Kindle, 92 percent
• Tablets: Amazon, 92 percent
• Breakfast cereal: Cheerios, 91 percent
• Gasoline: Shell, 89 percent
• Discount retail store: Walmart, 89 percent
• Social networking sites: Facebook, 88 percent
• Airline: US Airways, 85 percent
• Search engine: Google, 85 percent
• Pizza: Domino’s 84 percent
• Car Insurance: State Farm, 82 percent
• Casual Dining: Applebee’s, 82 percent
• Luxury hotel: Inter-Continental, 82 percent
• Bank: JP Morgan Chase, 79 percent
It bears repeating that women are the top marketing opportunity in today’s economy. They make 85 percent of all consumer purchasing decisions, and account for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending. Savvy marketers understand this, and will continue to look at ways to build brand loyalty with this key consumer.
April 10, 2013 @ 6:15 am
Thanks for sharing these survey results. I didn’t even know such an engagement survey existed so this is very interesting. We recently posted about how brands can engage moms and emotional connection is a big part of it – we touted Subaru as doing a good job right now: http://www.punchbowl.com/trends/blog/post/5-ways-to-up-your-brands-influence-with-mom