Generating loyalty beyond reason

3 minute read

1st March 2023

Great products and customers are not what make a business successful in the long-term. To build sustained success, you need your product to become a brand and for your customers to become loyalists.

The algorithms of the Internet can get you some initial sales. After identifying your ideal customer and the interests and products they spend time with, you can catch them with your sharpish pitch just when they’re expecting it least. If they’re in the market for what you have and the deal is good, then it won’t be long until business starts to flow.

The problem is that it’s likely to dry up before too long. That’s because sales generated this way are based on utility. The process was entirely passive on the part of the customer. Your offering fell into their laps and provided an immediate solution to something they needed or wanted at that point in time. In terms of customer gratification, you provided a short-term hit but there was very little real engagement. And without engagement, few will come back for more.

A product becomes a brand when it starts to engage beyond the level of mere utility. A brand is much more than just an effective delivery of a product or service. The strength of a brand is not in its logo or how much people remember it, it lies in the emotions it is able to conjure.

When David Allemann, Olivier Bernhard, and Caspar Coppetti founded On in 2010, their primary obsession was to create athletic footwear that would deliver a superior wearing experience for runners. They deliberately shunned the fancy aesthetics that had come to characterize the trainer market of the big brands. As On’s head of product design, Thilo Alex Brunner, put it “When we started, the market was quite saturated with shoes that looked a bit like sports cars. We came in and wanted to make a very reduced running shoe”.

Bernhard used to be a leading tri-athlete and had been experimenting with better shoe design for years. But Allemann and Coppetti were seasoned storytellers who understood the value of audience involvement. Together they took the revolutionary CloudTec®️ technology at the heart of the shoe and turned it into something that serious runners could believe in.

People’s actions – what they do, say and even think – are driven by what they feel. Few of us are as rational as we’d like to believe we are. When it comes to decisions, we tend to go with our gut a lot more than we go with the data. We trust our own intuitions more than our calculations.

The strength of a brand is in the emotions it evokes through the experience it offers. Of course, how good the actual product or service is at doing what it does forms an important part of this, but there is also a depth of associations that go beyond that. This is the stuff that leads people to identify with the brand and come to the simple conclusion “people like me have this in their lives”.

On chose not to trailblaze their product across the digisphere. They focused on getting the product right and making the sensation of just trying their shoes on as memorable as possible. They concentrated distribution on specialist running stores where serious runners go to receive a more curated customer experience. They built a constituency among people who care about what a running shoe can do rather than what it looks like, and let the word spread from there.

Discovery is a key part of this kind of experience. Looking for something and then finding it makes it yours in a way that something which just drops into your lap never will be. The stories we tell each other are much more about our journeys than our destinations.

It was only when the brand’s credibility had been established that On started to think about marketing top-spin. They signed up Roger Federer when it came to their attention that he was wearing their shoes without being paid to do so.

To achieve long-term success, a business needs to have a story that matters to its customers. Algorithms can speed the business up once that story is hatched, but they can’t create the story in the first place.

Ten years after On started their business, they had 7 million runners across 50 countries choosing their shoes. After twelve years, they successfully launched an IPO with a market capitalization of $6.5 billion. No other sportswear brand has come close to enjoying the same success over that period.

Products may drive trial based on convenience for the customer, but brands elicit commitment from the customer. They are based on a belief that can’t be generated mechanically, because it is unreasonable. True loyalty is a sense of ownership that extends beyond what makes good sense.