Brand Loyalty And Customer Retention Strategy

One of the key objectives of any branding strategy is to attract and retain customers by building customer loyalty. Increasingly though firms employ loyalty card programs to retain the customer although genuine brand loyalty of a customer cannot be expected to be built through such strategies. In this book, Saleem takes a different view about customer loyalty altogether and considers it as a 'product' for exchange. He attempts to commoditize the concept of brand loyalty to sell it to customers. In this regard, it requires the firm to offer something extraordinary in exchange for their long-term relationship. Such offerings are considered different to the traditional exchanges of goods and services for money. The title of the book therefore reflects the deep meaning of the concept of brand loyalty.As a product for exchange, Saleem sees customer brand loyalty as something of an affinity and bonding that comes from the bottom of the heart of customers. Brand loyalty does not pop up suddenly but may takes years to build it up through meaningful relationships. Also, the author believes that brand loyalty as a product has a life-cycle with stages of growth, maturity and decline. Having defined and described brand loyalty in depth, Saleem goes to examine the issues of managing loyalty in order to recruit and retain customers. It requires the firms to build and manage customer brand loyalty by identifying and offering loyalty attributes, he argues. In this regard, study of loyalty management may seem like an investigation into the understanding the concept of marketing orientation and customer relationship. Providing a new market segmentation model based on the attributes of the traditional marketing mix variables substantiates this argument. Moreover, this also helps to measure brand loyalty based on the attributes of customer loyalty and to construct the brand loyalty life-cycle. In a nutshell, this book is about brand loyalty management and, therefore, it is obviously about strategic customer orientation. Although the book takes the reader deeper into measuring the intensity of loyalty and examining the analytical tools, the focus is on developing a customer brand loyalty management strategy. Author believes this will remain an essential book for all marketing professionals. Brand managers, in particular, would find it very useful when it comes to formulating a strategy for brand loyalty management, Saleem believes.