What commits customers to brands? (clue: it isn’t love).

Marketing’s core role is to provide experiences that commit customers to a brand.

Can science shed any light on brand relationships and loyalty?

Neuroscientists have known for some time that objects and people are regulated in different regions of the brain, but which of these, if either, deals with brands?

Marketing professor Carolyn Yoon examined this question by asking respondents to assess the personalities of brands and people whilst in a brain scanner.

The results clearly showed that the brain treats brands like objects and not like people. So the customer-brand relationship is not like an interpersonal relationship.

Source: Yoon et al.

How, then. does this customer-brand relationship work? In this respect, one region in the brain stands out: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Scientific studies have shown this to control the following, which are of primary importance for managing the relationship between customers and brands:

• Expected reward: The more reward that we expect from a brand, the higher the activation in this area.
• Willingness to pay: The greater the activation in the vmPFC, the greater the willingness to pay.
• Purchase decision: When people decide which brand to purchase, activation in the vmPFC makes the difference.
• Loyalty to a brand: The vmPFC is significantly more activated in loyal customers than in disloyal customers.
• If the vmPFC is damaged, then brand preferences disappear entirely.

The vmPFC, closely linked to the reward system, ultimately extracts how much reward we expect from an act of purchasing or from consuming/using a brand. In other words, we are loyal to the brands that optimally reward us. Activation in the vmPFC is accompanied by things that motivate us, to which we aspire, because they reward us. To be relevant for us to take action it is not sufficient for a brand to be liked – it must have a reward value in order to motivate a (repeated) act of purchasing. Reward is therefore the neuropsychological basis for the ‘relationship‘ with, and commitment to, brands.

But what exactly happens when brands meet the functional and psychological goals of people through their rewards – and how does this lead to loyalty? Many insights into this exist. In his thesis ‘Motivational basis of the relationship and loyalty between brands and people‘ Dr. Dirk Held, co-founder of decode, concludes:

For consumers, brands are a means to an end – the relationship is instrumental in nature. People buy brands to have, do, be or become something.

Brands are objectified to at least symbolically achieve both functional goals (such as to clean clothes) as well as psychological goals (such as status). Core to this is the goal construct which plays a central role for motivated behaviour in both neuro-economics as well as in the psychology of motivation.

Brand choice and the experienced relationship and loyalty depend on the customer’s currently activated goals. In other words, the higher the expected reward associated with a brand, the stronger the relationship with it.

What are the implications of these findings for marketing practice?

• We should break away from the idea that the customer-brand relationship is analogous to an interpersonal relationship. A useful test is to judge elements of a brand‘s positioning by asking: Is this something that people want to have, do, be or become by buying our brand?
• This not only ensures the relevance of positioning, but also results in clear guidelines for the marketing mix: If a brand is oriented to the goal of welfare, a TV ad automatically looks different than when positioning to the goal of status. It is also clear whether, for example, a gold colour is correct: it is right for status, but not for welfare.

This is a summary of recent work. For the full detailed report please go to:

http://decodemarketing.co.uk/images/stories/science_updates/decode_ScienceUpdate_1_2016.pdf