Managing Customer Loyalty in the Retail Space

What 50 Years of Scientific Research Reveals

Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash

You’re probably familiar with the challenge: customers have more choices than ever, it’s harder to differentiate on the basics, and that one competitor always seems to have customers who stick around no matter what. What’s their secret?

The answer lies in understanding what actually drives customer loyalty. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of 50 years of scientific loyalty research, examining data from 319 studies covering nearly a million customers. The findings reveal what separates the loyalty winners from the losers.

The Loyalty Hierarchy

We approached the analysis by organizing loyalty drivers into three fundamental psychological categories:

• Cognitive drivers are the rational considerations: price, product selection, convenience, location, etc. Basically, all the logical reasons customers typically give when you ask them why they shop somewhere.
• Affective drivers are about feelings, such as how shopping at your store makes people feel, the atmosphere you create, the satisfaction they get from that experience.
• Social drivers involve relationships and connections. They can be interactions with your staff, the sense of community around your brand, or…