Does customer loyalty exist?
Years ago, some people are loyal to certain brands because they trust their product/service quality. These organizations took years and years to achieve this level of trust. They have being building their good reputation through providing good products > sales and marketing > customer satisfaction > word of mouth > good reputation. Back in the days, customers have only two sources to know about and how good a product is through the company (ads and salespeople) and people they knew (family, friends, colleagues…etc). Therefore, companies had strong influence on consumers to buy their products/services.
Today, technology and globalization have transformed almost everything. When a customer wants to buy a product, he/she asks people and surfs the internet for ratings, reviews, testimonials and comparisons with other competitors’ products on different criteria (prices, quality, specification, customer service…etc) from around the globe. Also, he/she has a lot of brands globally to choose from. The global has become one marketplace; it’s not one city, state or country any more. Companies have realized that and started adapting new approaches, such as, Customer-Centric, Delivering Profitable Value and Service Dominant Logic.
Providing Value Proposition in products/services that not only meets customer expectation, but also exceeds it is the key for successful products/services. It’s the customer experience area. Most of the people buy products because of its Value Proposition and customer experience. Are these people loyal to certain brands or the value proposition they get form these brands? For example, a person who has iPhone 4, then iPhone 5s and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 just came out. This person decided to get the Galaxy Note 3 because it has more Value Proposition and customer experience than iPhone 5s. Other people buy every new Apple product without even knowing what its new features or the difference between the new iPhone and old one, so do we call them loyal customers or Apple fans? Does customer loyalty exist?