Modern Loyalty: Love in a Time of Infinite Choice

While 77% of people surveyed repeatedly buy from the same brands, Repeat Purchasers and Brand Loyalists often have very different drivers. When asked to choose the top reasons they continuously purchase from the same brand, Repeat Purchasers within a vertical tend to point to more utilitarian qualities related to price and convenience. Meanwhile, Brand Loyalists within a vertical tend to prioritize more emotive and experiential qualities, like trust and service (though utilitarian qualities were still important, suggesting that base-line functional needs still need to be met). This indicates that to achieve loyalty, brand relationships should be up-leveled to a more emotional and experiential standing.

Millennials (ages 18–34) may be known to experiment, but to dismiss them as promiscuous shoppers would be a mistake. In some verticals, they are actually as likely as Boomers (ages 55+) to be Brand Loyalists. Not surprisingly though, Millennials are less loyal in verticals where experience and price play a bigger factor, like Airlines and Hotels. Millennials also want to be loyal to brands: they’re 1.75x more likely than Boomers to say they’d like to be brand-loyal, but they still face challenges. We found, however, that many of the challenges Millennials face are unique among them.

Compared to Boomers, Millenials who say they face loyalty challenges in each vertical are:

Likelihood to be loyal increases as household income increases: people surveyed who report a household income of $150,000 or more are 32% more likely to be loyal than those who report a household income of under $35,000. But then we asked people, regardless of household income, to describe the brands they love most. We divided these words into the following verticals: consistency, cost, quality and experience. By far the largest group of words was under experience. Perhaps people will always be willing to pay for the things that are memorable … whether that’s because of the taste they can’t get elsewhere or the family fun they’ll remember forever.

The words that brand loyalists use to describe the brands they love:

We’ve learned that parents navigate a landscape of infinite choices and voices by staying informed through use of mobile, Facebook and Instagram. So it’s not surprising that as New Parents³ develop carefully considered brand choices, they are more likely to be loyal to the brands they ultimately decide on. In fact, 42% of New Parents describe themselves as loyal compared to 36% of non-parents.⁴

New Parents are particularly more loyal in verticals that might not trigger as much loyalty in non-parents, such as Hotels. This is especially true of verticals with products and services that tend to be more experiential. We think it’s because a desire to experiment gets replaced with a desire to stick to what they know. After all, a restaurant’s food might not seem as important when parents start thinking about stroller access and crayons at the table.

Brand loyal New Parents compared to brand loyal non-parents

Loyalty to Facebook and Instagram suggests loyalty and repeat purchasing of brands. People who use Facebook more than five times a day are 1.25x more likely to be Brand Loyalists than people who use Facebook at least once a month. And the same holds true for Instagram: those who use Instagram more than five times a day are 1.26x more likely to be Brand Loyalists than those who use Instagram at least once a month. This could be because frequent platform usage of the platform is related to the type of loyalty behaviors that translate to relationships with other categories and companies.