I completely agree that building a strong relationship with your customers is key – it’s the core of much of the emotional loyalty aspect…

As far as your United example is concerned, United has no emotional loyalty with him and he would be an easy candidate to switch if, for example, a competing airline offered to replace the miles he would miss by moving. What one strives for in customers is a balance between all three aspects so as to have profitable advocates for your brand.

The purpose of this particular post was really to define the different aspects of loyalty, rather than to cover the subject in depth from all angles – something that would take too long for a blog post. I expect later posts will cover different aspects.

I’ll happily look at your site and look forward to further interaction.

Thanks again for your comments.

Two things to consider: who among your customers do you want to be loyalty, not all customers are equal, and what’s the basis of the loyalty. These are both important.

Heavy category users, who are the majority if not all of your best customers, have a very different perspective on what competing brands offer than the majority of customers. It’s important to understand this group’s needs and craft relationship marketing to appeal to them. Companies with a disproportionate share of heavy category users are category leaders. Without exception.

Each of the three forms or loyalty you describe are easily manipulated and measured but this doesn’t mean your best customers are, in fact, loyal.

I recently spoke with an executive who flies United. He hates the airline and is more than happy to say so. But he keeps flying with them because he has a gazinllion points. By the metric of behavior, and probably profitability, he is loyal. Is he?

A better goal is to focus on building relationship equity among best customers. Relationship equity is the equity that’s created when value is delivered that goes beyond functional benefits. It’s harder to understand and to measure but it has a huge impact on loyalty.

I write about this a lot on Hipkin’s Hip Shots and would be happy to explore this topic with you in more detail.

Hopefully we’ll have learnt our lesson from this!

Something many companies fail to do (even if they pay lip service to the idea), at their peril.

You can watch the 1to1 video, “Is There a Right Kind of Customer Loyalty” here:
http://www.1to1media.com/video/watch.aspx?v=wLbyc2uOY0c&playlist=New-Videos

Banks, especially the last few years, are prime examples of how to lose customer loyalty and turning them into enemies. Would be interesting to see a list of people who will never again have anything to do with the major banks in this world. Millions of people. And all because of catering to profitability at the expense of loyalty. May turn out to be a mistake in the long run.