Loyalty and the Emotional Aftershock

While it is a mistake to assume that all human behavior is driven by random emotions (or that emotions are at all random), it is likewise incorrect to believe that behavior is driven entirely by logic.   It is a collaboration between reason and emotion that drives actual behavior, but in that regard reason has been given too much credit and emotion too little – and this is the reason that many plans for marketing and customer loyalty do not work out in reality.

It’s generally recognized that the emotions lead reason, or at least occur before it.   To assess something we must notice it, and feel that it is important enough to spend time thinking about.     This is why advertising often communicates so little information about the product and its benefit – it is meant to create awareness and curiosity in a prospect, though it very often fails when it provides nothing to feed the curiosity it has created.

It’s also generally recognized that the emotions are what drives a person to select a specific brand.   While reason is employed to determine whether there is any benefit to purchasing a good or service, the goods and services in the present market are so commoditized that there is no reason to favor one brand over another.  The differences are usually quite negligible.

And it also seems to be generally believed that an individual’s loyalty to a brand is based on reason: that they evaluate their experience of using a product, determine whether their functional need was served, and if this equation returns an affirmative result, the individual repurchases that band rather than undertaking a fresh evaluation of his field of options.

But this last belief is subject to some argument: whether repurchasing out of convenience (or mental laziness) qualifies as loyalty – particularly when customers who report being completely satisfied by a given brand often try others and sometimes switch to a different one.   The “rational man” camp struggles to support its argument, and my sense is that loyalty has less to do with the rational evaluation of a product experience and more to do with the emotional aftershock of the entire experience of the brand.

If we accept that reason selects the product and emotion selects the brand, then the kind of satisfaction that arises from the cold, analytical assessment of whether the good or service satisfied the functional requirements supports a sense of satisfaction with the product – and not with the brand.  So any sense of loyalty to a given brand arises from the emotions that arise.  It seems sensible that if a product fulfilled the functional need, the consumer “feels happy” about the purchase and that some of this emotional halo will extend to the brand, but not a sufficient amount to create loyalty.

And to take it a step further, emotions are more important than reason in the long run.  The facts about the product, the evaluation of how it serves a need, and all of the rational thinking about the product ends very quickly after the product experience has ended, but the emotional aftershock, which is by its nature more vague and general, lasts for quite a long time after the rational thinking has ceased.

This is the reasons customers can very quickly respond to the question of how they feel about a brand, but much more slowly to what they think about the brand.   They can instantly say that they were happy with the experience, but it takes quite some time and reflection for them to recall the specific reasons that led them to purchase it and those that cause them to think that the product was suitable to a given purpose.

This is not to switch to the opposite extreme and declare reason to be of no use and encourage marketers to embrace emotion to the ignorance of anything else.  My sense is that reason is fundamental and that a product must stand a rational analysis – it must have satisfied the need for which it was purchased, or the emotions about the experience will be negative as well.   And I don’t suppose it’s possible to have good emotions about a functionally unsatisfactory experience.   But neither does a functionally satisfactory experience guarantee loyalty.   The emotional layer must be considered, though its rational underpinnings cannot be ignored.