Is brand loyalty dying? With so many ways to shop, consumers expect much more from brands, presenting steep competition to win their business. Research from McKinsey shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% express frustrations when those interactions fail to materialize. But while consumers hold more power of choice when engaging with brands, brand loyalty isn’t going away. It’s just evolving.
We’ve entered a new era of brand-building – an evolution in strategies, technology and formats employed to grow long-term brand equity, leveling the playing field for marketers. When it comes to harnessing new brand-building opportunities, it’s up to marketers to redefine the traditional parameters for building deeper connections with people. At the height of consumer expectations, brands must marry tried-and-true marketing principles with contemporary concepts. If that sounds contradictory, well, that’s because it is!
Here are three strategies that challenge conventional thinking but promise to forge lasting connections and captivate audiences for your brand.
Build an authentic brand by letting your audience shape your story
The digital age has transformed our culture, with people cultivating their personal brands online. As a result, consumers increasingly value new and different content over time-tested traditional advertising, relying on creators for honest brand reviews and engaging in discussions on their own terms. Placing more of your brand’s destiny in consumers’ hands enhances brand loyalty and expands your reach by maximizing the likelihood of being a part of their content.
The era of the 30-second TV spot has given way to mobile platforms, where people connect and create. Highly polished videos can now be seen as inauthentic online. For example, creators and consumers share content via short-form video formats like Reels and Stories on Instagram and Facebook. These tools offer more creativity, a low barrier to experimentation, and allow marketers to fit the format and fidelity consumers expect. Partnering with creators holds the potential to drive discovery to new audiences, especially younger audiences, as Gen Z and Millenials are two times more likely to trust creators than Baby Boomers. Granting creators and consumers agency in evolving your brand’s narrative not only meets audiences where they are but also fosters trust within communities and furthers your brand’s equity over time.
Leverage AI to engineer serendipity
Whether recommending a new product or offering expanded services, consumers seek brands that will meet their personalized needs and wants. At the same time, they want to be early adopters of a trending brand or product. Striking the right balance between prediction and surprise may seem impossible. But, with the help of AI technology, you can create personalized creative and serendipitous discovery experiences that speak to each consumer. At Meta, AI has been at the core of our DNA, and we’re working to create 3 billion customized experiences for everyone across our platforms. Leveraging tools like Meta’s new generative AI-powered features for ad creatives, such as background generation, image expansion, and text variations, can help maximize productivity, personalization, and performance for all advertisers.
Simultaneously, AI can empower marketers to test and prove creative to understand what works best, the right audiences to target and the optimal budgets to put behind your ad spend. For example, with Meta’s Conversions API, marketers can increase performance and efficiency by connecting directly to their brand’s marketing data to optimize ad targeting and decrease cost per result. Combining the power of AI with your own data can fuel delightful ad experiences that enhance – not disrupt – your audience’s ad experience to drive more meaningful, long-term connections to your brand.
Prioritize everyday interactions as much as tentpole marketing moments
Modern brand building requires the understanding that everyday moments hold the same scale and impact as major tentpole advertising moments. For example, 200 billion Reels are watched daily on Facebook and Instagram. That means delivering a frictionless online transaction or reposting a customer’s Instagram Story may have a more lasting impact on consumer perception than a standalone ad campaign.
Frequent, light-touch, everyday moments can have a lasting impact on brand loyalty. Leading marketers prioritize small engagements alongside major campaigns. For instance, a global sports drink brand known for its presence around key cultural and sports moments also found that its everyday activations drove a significant impact on its long-term equity. Its campaigns on Meta drive 61% of media’s total contribution to preference, a key metric for the brand, outpacing traditional media like TV.
Brand loyalty isn’t fading, it’s just expanding. In the modern world, people value shared experiences and unique stories from their peers and favorite brands. It's up to marketers to work against the grain and move between contradictions – from your brand to their stories, serendipity to data-driven predictability and major moments to everyday interactions.
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