Here One Day and Gone the Next – is Brand Loyalty Fleeting?

Talk to any business, large or small, and they will tell you how important customer loyalty is to their company. From Main Street to Wall Street, loyalty is the lifeblood of building a successful brand.

This is the goal of many marketers and managers, to earn the loyalty of their customers. They hold the misconception that customer loyalty is lasting; an unbreakable bond – a marriage of sorts. It is not. A person’s loyalty to a brand is fleeting; it is temporary and can be lost at any moment.

People are not loyal to a company, a product, or a service…at the end of the day they are loyal to themselves first.

They act in their self interests and continuously re-evaluate their decisions as a result. It is a mistake for brands to forget this.

Let me give you an example.

Earlier this month I switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. Just typing that just doesn’t feel right, because I was a brand evangelist for Firefox. For the past six years, I used Firefox and loved every minute of it. I was passionate about the brand, and I went out of my way to sing its praises and convince other people to switch.

What happened? Why did I switch internet browsers? Because it was in my best interest, of course.

I recently upgraded to the latest version of the browser, Firefox 4. I was initially excited to see the new features, but it turned out to be an awful decision for myself, and for Firefox.

• It was slow and repeatedly crashed.
• The interface and layout was completely different.
• I had to spend a substantial amount of time learning how to “customize” it in order to give it some semblance of my previous versions of Firefox.

One day, while I was waiting for the crashed Firefox to reboot, I gave into temptation and began trying out the Chrome browser. It did what an internet browser was suppose to do–it was fast and didn’t crash. The interface was a little different from my previous Firefox versions, but hey, I was going to need to learn the new Firefox 4 interface anyways right? They also made it super easy to switch by importing all of my Firefox passwords, history, and bookmarks. I made the switch and the rest is history.

Remember that loyalty is fleeting. Getting the devotion of customers is easy; keeping it is the hard part.