Brand Switching

"62% of consumers who switched brand in the past 12 months did so because brands successfully attracted them, rather than bad customer experience pushing them away.

61% of consumers switched brand at least once in the last year, with automotive (70%) and supermarkets (68%) showing the highest percentage of customers willing to switch brands due to the lure of new opportunities.

Only banking found previous poor customer experience to be an equally decisive factor for the switch, where it was a 50-50 split.

Consumers see a brand being ‘genuine’ as more important in encouraging them to try a startup versus an existing brand they haven’t tried before (31% vs 17%). ‘Innovativeness’ (25% vs 20%) is also important, as well as ‘reflecting a consumer’s values’ (17% vs 13%)."

Source: MarketingWeek Monday, September 30, 2019 email 

Data source: Data & Marketing Association (DMA)

So authenticity, innovation and shared values are brand attributes that can lead to new brand trial and brand switching behavior. And, per previous research, high customer satisfaction does not guarantee customer loyalty. In fact, in categories in which customer satisfaction is high across most or all brands, loyalty is diminished.

For other thoughts on brand loyalty, authenticity, innovation and shared values consider these blog posts:

Loyalty: 

• Brand Loyalty vs. Brand Entrapment

Authenticity:

• Brands and Authenticity
• Brands and Authenticity
• Authentic Brands

Innovation:

• Brands, Change & Innovation
• Innovation and Brand Growth
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Creating New Categories Versus Battling it Out for Market Share

Shared Values:

• Brand Attributes, Benefits & Values
• Sharing Your Brand's Values Through Storytelling
• Improving the World Through Brands
• The Tesla Brand

Other reasons why customers may switch brands:

• Customer service is poor or lacking
• The brand does not deliver at least an adequate value for the price
• You do not have an adequate understanding of the customer and his or her needs
• Your brand is resting on its laurels, it is no longer exciting, it is not keeping up with the competition
• Your brand is not readily available or accessible compared to other brands
• Another brand offers a free trial and delivers a better value proposition
• A superior disruptive brand enters the market
• Your brand has not established sufficient emotional connection with its customers

We recommend that clients constantly measure their customers' attitudinal loyalty and emotional connection to the brand. Our BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system measures attitudinal loyalty and increasing degrees of emotional connection. Even small statistically significant changes can be bellwethers for potential problems. But know that no amount of measured satisfaction or loyalty can guarantee that brand switching won't occur.  

Historical Brands in America

John Jacob Bausch & Henry Lomb

I recently purchased The Branding of America book by Robert Hambleton at an art gallery used book sale. One of the things that I immediately found fascinating (though not surprising in retrospect) is that most of the earlier brands in America were named after the people who founded the brands versus using coined or associative descriptive names, which is a much more common approach in contemporary branding.

Here are some examples:

• Colgate: William Colgate
• Levi Strauss: Levi Strauss
• Borden's: Gail Borden
• Steinway: Heinrich Engelhard Steinway
• Campbell's: Joseph Campbell
• Heinz: Henry John Heinz
• Bissell: Melville Reuben Bissell
• Gillette: King Camp Gillette
• Kraft: James Lewis Kraft
• Maytag: Frederick Lewis Maytag
• Schick: Jacob Schick
• Bausch & Lomb: John Jacob Bausch & Henry Lomb
• Westinghouse: George Westinghouse
• Johnson & Johnson: Robert Wood Johnson & James Johnson
• Dow: Herbert Henry Dow
• Ferris Wheel: George Washington Gale Ferris
• McCormick: Cyrus Hall McCormick
• John Deere: John Deere
• Yale: Linus Yale
• Otis: Elisha Graves Otis
• Crane: Richard Teller Crane
• Pitney-Bowes: Arthur H. Pitney & Walter Bowes
• Remington: Eliphalet Remington
• Colt: Samuel Colt
• Smith & Wesson: Horace Smith & David Baird Wesson
• Winchester: Oliver Fisher Winchester
• Studebaker: The Studebaker brothers
• Buick: David Buick
• Packard: James Ward Packard & William D. Packard
• Ford: Henry Ford
• Chevrolet: Louis Chevrolet
• Chrysler: Walter Percy Chrysler
• Pabst: Frederick Pabst
• Saks: Horace A. Saks
• RJ Reynolds: Richard Joshua Reynolds
• Spalding: Albert G. Spalding
• J. Walter Thompson: James Walter Thompson
• Woolworth: Frank Winfield Woolworth
• Sears: Richard W. Sears
• Dow Jones: Charles Henry Dow & Edward C. Jones
• Wrigley: William Wrigley Jr. 
• Elizabeth Arden: Elizabeth Arden
• Kresge: Sabastian Spering Kresge
• Orvis: Charles F. Orvis

As an outlier, George Eastman named his company Eastman Kodak Company in 1892. The word Kodak was registered as a trademark in 1888. George Eastman said, "I devised the name myself. The letter 'K' had been a favorite with me - it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with a 'K.' The word "Kodak" is the result." The coined name 'Kodak' became the brand. 

Compare all of these brands with some of today's entrepreneurs and their brand's names:

• Microsoft: Bill Gates
• Amazon: Jeff Bezos
• Patagonia: Yvon Chouinard
• IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad
• Virgin: Richard Branson
• Starbucks: Howard Schulz
• Tesla: Elon Musk
• Google: Larry Page & Sergey Brin
• Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg
• Yahoo!: Jerry Yang & David Filo
• Lululemon: Chip Wilson
• Airbnb: Joe Gebbia & Brian Chesky
• Uber: Travi Kalanick

It is interesting how entrepreneurs have largely moved away from naming brands after themselves to creating coined, associative descriptive or fanciful names. This is an example of how branding has evolved over time. 

PS - One modern outlier is Donald Trump, who brands all of his businesses with his last name. 

Cognitive Distortions & Marketing

I think everyone should learn about the most common cognitive distortions (or thinking errors) as we are all subject to them. Importantly, I have increasingly witnessed political campaigns playing to many of these errors to achieve their intended ends. I believe this is highly unethical. But understanding what these errors are will help you understand how people (including you) can be and are being manipulated. And, as I am sure you know, politicians aren't the only ones playing to these errors. Anyone who is trying to sell you something has a tendency to do this if he or she knows about these errors and is less than completely ethical.

Here are some of the most common errors:

• Anchoring bias - you are over reliant on the first piece of information that you see or on the first belief to which you were exposed
• Conservatism bias - you tend to favor prior evidence or thinking over new evidence or thinking, causing you to be slow to change
• Confirmation bias - only seeing those things that confirm your preconceived notions, including any prejudices or other biases 
• Choice-supportive bias - when you have chosen something, you tend to feel more positive about that thing
• Dunning-Kruger effect - people of low ability have illusionary superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability to be greater than it is
• Overconfidence - this is a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect that might appear in people of any cognitive ability level
• Availability heuristic - you overestimate the importance of the information that is available to you over other information that is not
• Filtering (or selective perception) - seeing only what you want to see while filtering out the rest
• Clustering illusion - seeing what you want to see in random patterns or events
• Polarized (or black & white) thinking - if it is not this, then it must be that - there is no room for gray areas, complexity or nuance
• Negative bias - you tend to believe in and respond more to the negative than the positive, related to this, you act more out of fear than hope or vision
• Overgeneralization - making generalized conclusions based on one or a very few data points
• Jumping to conclusions - making a snap judgement before all of the facts are in - deciding on the outcome prior to the analysis
• Magnifying or minimizing the scale of an event or problem - blowing it out of proportion or significantly downplaying it
• Oversimplifying - taking something complex and simplifying it to the degree that it cannot be properly understood or addressed
• Bandwagon effect - this is a form of groupthink in which you are more confident in a position that a large number of people seem to share
• Fundamental attribution error - you overemphasize your personal uniqueness
• Always being right - assuming that you are always right and that anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong
• Projection bias - you think people think like you, agree with you and support your point of view whether they do or not
• Labeling - you might label something to make it look bad, argue against it or lump it with others in a larger group - you might also mislabel something
• Emotional reasoning - making decisions based on how you feel rather than objective reality
• Personalizing - taking everything personally, holding yourself personally responsible for something that was not completely within your control
• Blaming - this is the opposite of personalizing - with this error, you do not take personal responsibility; rather you point the finger at others
• Fallacy of change - thinking that others need to change for you to be happy
• Confusing correlation with causation - just because two things appear to be correlated does not mean that one caused the other
• Framing effect - you accept or reject something based on how it was framed
• Context effect - for instance, luxury items only advertised in upscale magazines and sold in upscale retail outlets are perceived to be of higher quality
• Taking something out of context - without context, something might be interpreted completely differently
• Observing just a portion of the whole - you might observe data points that contradict the general trend, for instance, if you choose a different shorter or more limited timeframe
• Placebo effect - believing that something will have a specific effect often causes it to have that effect
• Authority bias - you tend to follow people in authority rather than your own conscience - you chose authority over your own decisions
• Illusory truth effect (or reiteration effect) - the more something is repeated, the more you think it is true even if it isn't
• Scarcity effect - the more scarce you think something is, the more you want it - this applies to exclusivity
• Recency - tending to weigh the more recent information more heavily
• Zero-risk (or loss aversion) bias - you would rather avoid any risk even if slight risk would result in a large reward
• Pro-innovation bias - getting overly excited about anything new
• Action bias - you prefer action over anything else even if the action is ill-conceived and dangerous or dysfunctional
• Decoy effect - often marketers feature one or more items at a very high price (or a much poorer value) to make the other higher priced (or better value) items seem more reasonable
• The choice paradox - the more choices you have the more anxious you feel

I could provide an example of how each of these cognitive errors was used in sales, marketing, persuasion or manipulation, but I will provide just five examples and leave it to you to think about how the others can be and are being used in this way.

• Emotional reasoning - consider pharmaceutical advertisements in which there is an emotionally appealing scene of two lovers strolling through a field of wildflowers while the company is quickly mentioning the possible negative side effects of the drug
• Labeling - consider the way our current US president labels his enemies as a way to make them seem less desirable 
• Framing effect - this is what almost every public relations firm specializes in - marketing copywriters are also expert at this
• Decoy effect - this is why many realtors show house hunters the highest priced, poorest value house first
• Scarcity (or exclusivity) effect (and context effect) - this explains while luxury brands such as Vilebrequin limit their distribution to only a small number of upscale shopping centers in carefully targeted upscale markets

Listen First, Talk Later

You may have heard the statement, "That is why God gave you two ears and only one mouth, to listen twice as much as you speak." Listening more than you speak is good advice for any human being, but especially so for salespeople and marketers.

A marketer that has not asked open-ended response questions of customers and potential customers in depth interviews, focus groups and other qualitative research forums is at an extreme disadvantage. I even load my quantitative research instruments up with those types of questions. And a salesperson who sticks to the selling script and makes sure he hits on all of the qualifying questions without first building rapport and trying to understand the customer's hopes, fears, needs and desires is an ineffective salesperson.

I recently read an article that indicated that most people listen to formulate their response rather than to understand.

If I have said this once, I have said it thousands of times - a brand personifies an organization and its products and services. In this way, it is able to build an emotional connection with its audiences. Emotional connection starts with rapport building. It grows with understanding, deep understanding. I counsel marketers that they should know their customers' beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, anxieties, needs and desires. Further, they should know where these customers go for information and advice about the brand's product or service category. Frankly, they should also know something about the customer's personal life. I often ask the question, "What keeps you up at night?"

Listen first and speak later. And when the customer is on a roll, follow that line of thought. Did you know that people who do more listening than talking are more likable than people who do more talking than listening? Everyone wants to be heard. And one cannot be heard if you are too busy talking.

I was recently in a very high end men's clothing store. I was interested in purchasing a variety of items. But the salesperson, rather that watching me to see what I gravitated toward, kept on leading me to items and styles in which I had no interest. When I did not respond positively to his direction, he only tried harder. I did not buy anything from that store that day. My wife was with me and encouraged me to stay and try on the items in which I was interested. I respectfully declined to do so. I had to get out of there because the salesperson was annoying me to the point of complete frustration.

A good salesperson or marketer has a sense of what motivates people, why they act the way they do, when they are displaying buying signals and when they are signaling that they are annoyed, bored or angry. Being able to read body language is also a plus in this profession. But the most important thing is ask the right questions and then to carefully listen to the responses to those questions, including the nonverbal responses.

My client proposals have a very high acceptance rate. Why? Because when I am on a sales call, I ask the right questions to best understand the person's pain points, what he wants to accomplish and what he would consider to be a win. And then I feed that understanding back to him along with my recommended approach based on his very specific needs. People have used different words to describe this process including consultative selling and strategic selling. What is is not is transactional selling.

The bottom line: Listen to your customers before you say anything to them. You have two ears and one mouth.

Bulletproof Process to Reposition Your Brand

Over the past twenty-one years, BrandForward has successfully repositioned more than 200 brands in almost every product and service category. We have worked with start-ups, Fortune 100 companies, B2B companies, B2C companies, not-for-profit organizations, colleges and universities, financial institutions, health care systems, trade associations, municipalities and more.

Throughout that time, we have refined a proven process to successfully reposition brands to be unique, emotionally compelling and believable. And we have worked with many brands to transform them into "category of one" brands.

We have differentiated brands in commodity categories and built strong emotional appeal into brands that had previously differentiated themselves based solely on functional attributes. We have created brand positions that work across a wide array of product and service categories, rebranded merged entities and connected brand positions to marketing campaigns.

This brand positioning process normally costs tens of thousands of dollars. Today, I am offering you an online version of this process for only $275. This is inconsequential compared to most brand marketing budgets. And to sweeten the deal, I will give you a signed copy of my best-selling Brand Aid book ($29.95 value) and three hours of my consulting time ($1,000 value) for free. I think you will agree with me that the ROI for this small investment is exceedingly large.

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