The Best of Brand Loyalty Research: Are You Friends With Consumers?

While customer acquisition is important to any growing business, it occasionally overshadows just how vital customer retention is. Generally speaking, finding and gaining a new customer is much more expensive than maintaining a positive relationship with a current customer. As such, developing brand loyalty should be a huge part of any business’s long-term strategy. The only problem is that it can sometimes be difficult to measure brand loyalty with precision. Here, we’ll take a look at some brand loyalty research techniques that companies can use to determine how well they connect with consumers.

Brand Loyalty Research 101

A customer may be considered “brand loyal” if they consistently choose to purchase your product or services instead of those offered by your competitors. Another way to characterize loyalty, then, is to review purchase history and customer satisfaction. Though different companies and industries will obviously display different purchase patterns, brand loyal customers will –– normally –– patronize one company over others. In order to effectively measure brand loyalty, market researchers must use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. That’s because brand loyalty has “degrees” to it. There’s a big difference between a customer who shops at your store once a quarter and another who does so twice a week. So keep that in mind moving forward.

Quantitative Brand Loyalty Research

One of the first things a business may decide to do when measuring brand loyalty is to conduct a wide survey of their customer base. Introducing certain binary questions (“Were you satisfied with your experience?” “Have you shopped here before?” “Will you shop here in the future?” etc.) can give you a raw understanding of what percentage of your customers are –– to some extent –– loyal.

From there, researchers can use further quantitative measures like questionnaires to gain deeper insights into customer behavior. This can give researchers the ability to determine consumer habits that reflect their level of satisfaction and loyalty. (For instance, how often customers patronize a business, how much they enjoyed their experience, and/or if they’d be willing to recommend it to a friend.)

Qualitative Brand Loyalty Research

Through quantitative research methods, businesses can determine what percentage of their customers are somewhat loyal, very loyal, or not loyal at all. While this can certainly be beneficial information, qualitative brand research can add further meaning to the data. By conducting focus groups and face-to-face interviews with consumers, researchers will be able to assess the nature of a customer’s loyalty to a brand. Specific, granular conclusions drawn from qualitative research can explain why consumers value one brand over another, and highlight how businesses perform in the eyes of individual consumers.

Putting it All Together

As with any research project, the key to gleaning value from it is to organize the data and findings, analyze it, and present it in a cogent manner that can be used to improve future performance. Though all of this is easier said than done, business leaders can turn to the professionals at Research America for such services. Our team has years of experience and in-depth knowledge in the field of market research, and we’ll use our skills and resources to help your company achieve its goals. We don’t offer cookie-cutter solutions. Instead, we’ll work closely with your organization to identify challenges unique to your business and to develop solutions just for your situation. You can Contact us here to learn more about our methods or to get started with us today.