Once upon a time, customers used to be just a few numbers that you added to get your total sales. In those days, your customers had limited options about where to buy and what they could buy. Fast forward to the day when consumers have so many product options and can shop at literally thousands of businesses around the world. For example, consider shoes. A person who wants to buy a pair of shoes has thousands of shoes to choose from and several hundred companies. As a shoe manufacturer, your goal would be to create something in your shoes that the consumer will not find anywhere else. You would strive to create more comfortable, stylish and better fitting shoes for the customer to buy from you.

Basically, this changes the whole dynamics of the customer-company relationship. The customer now has the power in most cases and companies move around to get their attention. In the last decade, ‘customer loyalty’ has become the holy grail of researchers and marketers around the world. Traditional ways of measuring success by conducting customer satisfaction surveys didn’t seem to make sense as they realized that customer satisfaction doesn’t necessarily result in repeat purchases.

The chances of a customer giving you repeat business definitely increase if they are satisfied with a previous purchase of your product. But chances are, you can be easily swayed by the barrage of ads that bombard you from all sides. So with this paradigm shift, ‘customer loyalty’ became the latest buzzword for measuring the success of any marketing department.

Several studies have shown that customers become loyal when they have repeated outstanding experiences with a product over time. Not only that, they become emotionally attached to your product, which could cause them not to act rationally the next time they make a purchase of your product. They become more tolerable if you spoil your product at some point. They recommend your product to friends and family and are not easily swayed by the latest fashions or price differences. In short, they not only buy your product, but they also act as evangelizers of your products. And we all know that word of mouth marketing is the most effective there is.

One of the best examples we see today is Apple’s Macintosh cult. These Mac fans swear by all things Apple made. They have gone through considerable trouble coexisting in a PC dominated world. They wait in lines for hours (sometimes even days) before a new Apple product is launched. With loyal customers like these, repeat business is almost guaranteed. This is exactly why marketing companies try to develop a similar emotional connection between consumers and their products. Because they know that if they can achieve this brand loyalty, everything else will follow naturally.