Well, I can console myself that at least I was on to something, according to research published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
So, to put all my work on this paper to some sort of use, I think I’ll bore all you with it.
Brand loyalty and attachment theory
In 1989, I bought two J. Crew cotton turtlenecks at the J. Crew outlet store in Freeport, Maine. The other day, I noticed a small hole where a seam was starting to separate on one of the turtlenecks. I felt a little sad – after all, I had worn the turtleneck frequently for 13 winters. I’d grown quite attached to it.
In 1987, I found a bargain in a used 1984 Honda Accord with 80,000 miles on the odometer. I drove that car past 200,000 miles and then sold it to a friend for his teenage daughter. The next car I bought, in 1997, was a 1994 Honda Accord with 60,000 miles on the odometer. I’m driving that car still.
Since that first J.Crew purchase, I’ve purchased many other J. Crew products for myself and my husband. Every product I’ve bought has performed as well as those first two turtlenecks, and every catalog order I’ve made has been transacted satisfactorily.
And because of the trust I’ve developed in Honda, when it’s time for a new car, chances are excellent I will buy another Honda Accord. The cars have performed exceptionally well over time, and so I’ve grown attached to the brand.
Clearly, longevity is one of the things I seek in a brand and when I find it, I am loyal and will choose that brand over others and over the generic alternative. Although I might initially been susceptible to buying a generic garment or a brand other than Honda, my personal style caused me to sample the brands because of price incentives, then remain with the brands because they fulfilled my emotional needs for reliability and sturdiness.
Brand loyalty is like love. We seek to fill personal needs and respond when we find it. The consumer/brand connection is a relationship that develops over time and interactions. Therefore, in this paper I will indulge in some creative theorizing by applying psychologist John Bowlby’s attachment theory to the consumer/brand relationship. Just as our pattern of relationships with people develop early in our lives through our interactions with our caregivers and their sensitivity and responsiveness to our needs, so do our relationships with brands develop through our early and ongoing interactions with these brands. In addition, the general attachment style of the consumer can also play a role in each individual’s inclination to be loyal to a brand.
The original attachment theory refers to the child’s bond with his or her primary caregiver, usually the mother. One view of attachment, according Parent Education for Early Childhood is a result of “daily, routine care given to babies by parents.” And, writes author Christine Z. Cataldo, “Attachment is also related to communication. Infants and parents learn to ‘read’ each other’s signals, creating a responsive pattern of interaction.”
These routes to attachment translate easily into the most basic marketing strategies.
“Emotion sells and brand defection is a direct result of this being manifested in customer’s minds by feelings of not being wanted or loved,” writes David M. Martin in Romancing The Brand. If your customer doesn’t love your brand, and your brand doesn’t love the customer back, all the advertising your budget can buy will not lead to brand loyalty.
In Emotional Branding, Daryl Travis writes, “A transaction makes the cash register ring once. A relationship makes it ring again and again. And selling takes on a new dimension when you put it in the context of a relationship. Selling is often talking to. A relationship is usually talking with.”
Duane E. Knapp writes in The Brandmindset that, “to concentrate on product alone is to assume that the customer doesn’t care about time, convenience, feelings, and overall satisfaction.” Switching back to the concept of parenting attachment, to concentrate on product alone would be comparable to feeding and clothing a child without paying attention to whether the child is hungry, whether the clothing is comfortable, and when the child needs love and attention more than food. This is a form of child neglect and often results in the children maturing into adults who have difficulties making emotional attachments. So, too, would that kind of neglect of a customer’s preferences produce a consumer who does not connect in lasting relationships with your brand.
So clearly, listening to what your customer wants is key to establishing brand loyalty in that customer and in general. If J. Crew and Honda were to sit down and talk with me about my personal needs, they would hear that sturdiness and reliability are high on my list, and that to establish and maintain a relationship with me, their products must be and remain sturdy and reliable.
But there is another side to the development of brand loyalty/attachment theory and that is the consumer’s individual attachment style as it spills over from interpersonal relationships to relationships with products. Bowlby theorized, and researcher Mary Ainsworth confirmed in her famous “Strange Situation” experiments, that there are three types of attachment: secure attachment and two types of insecure attachments, one that manifests itself in clinginess and one in wariness.
So how does this apply to brand loyalty? I propose the following model for attachment styles among consumers, based on the Bowlby model, which are consistent with their attachment patterns in interpersonal relationships:
The securely attached consumer: These consumers are not blindly attached, but thoughtfully so. They consider the information and choose their brand because it fulfills their needs. These consumers respond to quality, consistency, responsiveness from the company, repeated good results. Like infants who are secure that someone will come to the rescue when they cry, securely attached consumers select brands responsive to their needs and are unwilling to accept less from the companies with which they do business.
The ambivalent insecurely attached consumer: These consumer maintain firm and irrational attachment to a brand (“If it was good enough for my mama, it’s good enough for me.”) and are unwilling to experiment with other brands. Due to a basic insecurity about their own judgment, they are difficult to pry away from a brand they have decided on it, are not open to new information, are insecure with trying something new for fear of making a mistake or somehow being disloyal, which could result in some kind of abandonment. They can become angry when favorite brands are tampered with.
The avoidant insecurely attached consumer: These consumers resist being wooed by brands and avoid attachment to brands. They display what Bowlby calls “compulsive self-reliance,” which may cause them to buy according to price rather than brand because they are essentially not trusting and do not rely on information from companies to make their decisions. These consumers are indifferent to brand marketing. Getting these consumers’ attention and persuading them to be loyal to one brand is difficult and they are most likely of the three consumers to choose generics over brands.
These attachment styles play out in the act of shopping. I recently spent an afternoon shopping with a friend who has a secure attachment style in her personal relationships, as evidenced by her relationship with her family of origin. I was surprised and even a little discomfited by this woman’s ability to shop strictly according to brand. She went directly to the companies she preferred – Kiehls, Victoria’s Secret, Clinique -- to spend her money. Had I been shopping for the same items she needed, I would have spent many hours, perhaps even days, seeking the best values regardless of brand.
I am an avoidant insecurely attached consumer, just as I am insecurely attached in my personal relationships. I am not particularly conscious of brands and am difficult to sell to on basis of brand alone. For me, price incentives are more powerful than brand marketing. Note that my first J. Crew purchases were at an outlet store and all my Hondas have been purchased used.
Because I am skittish and hard to convince, I am not a consumer worth actively pursuing. In Emotional Branding, Daryl Travis cites Larry Light on “...the necessity of attracting not just loyal customers, but the right loyal customers – the loyal heavy users. He quotes part of a proprietary study done by The Campbell Soup Company, which segmented its buyers into four consumer groups: most profitable, profitable, borderline, and avoid. The most profitable group delivered three times the profit of the break-even borderline group. All of one brand’s profits came from a mere 10 percent of its customer base.”
As a wary, insecurely attached consumer, I am in the “borderline” or even “avoid” group. I am not attractive to marketers, but I can be seduced by price incentives backed up with the reliability and sturdiness I crave. “Customers looking for the lowest price will only be loyal to the price, not the brand. On the other hand when customers perceive that the brand consistently delivers value, it has the foundation to become a genuine brand,” Knappe writes.
Although I had heard good things about Hondas, if I had found another car that did not have a bad reputation at an acceptable price, I might have purchased that and never found my way to Honda loyalty. (In fact, my first two cars were VW Rabbits but I was persuaded by my husband not to buy a third because he perceived them as unreliable.) However, just as people who are insecurely attached in their personal relationships can, over time and with consistent positive experiences, for secure attachments (as I have with my husband of 17 years), so can they develop brand loyalty with reliable products.
I am also a consumer who is loyal, but only up to a point. While I am not normally brand-conscious, once I have developed an attachment to a brand, I am that brand’s to lose by not maintaining the qualities that hooked me. My wariness makes me easy to lose. “There is no doubt that a customer who feels valued and loved by you will be more likely to remain with you and give you every opportunity to do more business with them,” writes Martin.
In contrast to my purchasing style, a securely attached consumer might make the same brand choices I have made in Honda and J. Crew, but for different reasons. A securely attached consumer may decide on Honda after researching the brand, decide on J. Crew because of the lifestyle depicted in the company’s advertising. These customers might be reached through traditional brand marketing methods, including lifestyle branding. They are more confident and less wary than I and more likely to be unabashedly attracted to a brand as a lifestyle choice because they are less in need of “proof” of love. They also will be open to new products under a brand name.
These are savvy consumers who think well of themselves and are likely to bail out of “abusive” relationships with brands that, for example, change products capriciously and not for the better, or that market intrusively without respecting the consumer’s personal boundaries. One of the hallmarks of abusive parental behaviors is a blurring of boundaries between parent and child which can manifest itself in parents not giving children privacy or becoming controlling. This also translates quite easily into the relationship between product and consumer, which can become abusive when marketers don’t respect consumers’ privacy.
“Customers like intimacy, but not intrusive, and good relationship management can make the difference between whether your brand is perceived as a really close friend or an unwelcome visitor” writes Martin. A company that pesters customers with numerous telemarketing calls, that requires too much personal information with run-of-the-mill purchases (a la Radio Shack), or that nickels and dimes its customers, may drive even the securely attached consumer away.
The ambivalent insecurely attached customer can be extremely loyal to certain products, but is not necessarily open to changes in the brand or new products in the brand family. These are the customers who buy Ivory soap but not Ivory Liqui-Gel, use Arm & Hammer Baking Soda but resist Arm & Hammer Fabric Softener Sheets. These customers have a large dose of sentimentality mixed into their brand-sensitivity and are loyal to a product out of entrenched habit rather than thoughtfulness about the reality of a brand, just as a child might be attached to the concept of “mother” yet feel ambivalent about the reality of a mother who is not responsive to his or her needs.
In addition, these customers, entrenched in a concept rather than a product, are easier to anger with changes than to seduce with improvements. These are the customers who believe that “if it ain’t broke, why fix it” and who prefer “the way we were” to “new and improved.”
Clearly, it is important for those in branding research to understand the various attachment styles people bring to the consumer experience by asking such questions as why consumers try new brands, what qualities in a brand makes them feel connected, and what brands can do to alienate them as consumers. By understanding the emotional needs and attachment styles consumers bring to shopping for products, companies can learn how to woo and retain the most desirable consumers – those who are capable of lasting and developing relationships with brands. In addition, companies can learn how to keep the insecurely attached avoidant consumers who stumble upon the brand, and how to help insecurely attached ambivalent consumers embrace new product developments from the brands to which they’ve grown attached. In addition, if they choose, marketers can target difficult attachment styles by, for example, targeting ambivalent insecurely attached consumers with nostalgic marketing of new products and insecure avoidant consumers with price incentives backed up by nurturing customer service.
Clearly, my theory is as yet just that – a theory based on anecdotal evidence and speculation. Further research would be required to connect interpersonal attachment style with consumer attachment style, and then to relate that to marketing style for various consumers. However, as choices in products increase exponentially, all competing for the same consumers, marketers will need to explore deeply not only what the individual product brings to the marketplace, but what the individual consumer brings as well.
Cataldo, Christine Z. Parent education for early childhood : child-rearing concepts and program content for the student and practicing professional / Publisher: New York : Teachers College, Columbia Univerity, c1987.
Martin, David N. Title: Romancing the brand : the power of advertising and how to use it / Publisher: New York : AMACOM, c1989. Description: xvi, 215 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.
Emotional branding : how successful brands gain the irrational edge / Daryl Travis (with help from Harry). Author: Travis, Daryl. Holdings: Item Holdings
Call Number: 658.8343 T782E 2000 Publisher: Roseville, Calif. : Prima Venture, c2000.
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