How loyal your consumers are can make or break you as a brand. It’s critical that you not only measure the loyalty of consumers to your own brand but also to your competitors — so you can then activate those insights for strategic planning. The secret to understanding consumer loyalty lies in location intelligence. Through location intelligence, you can see how many times consumers visit your own stores versus your competitors’ over time, and then turn those insights into action.
Loyalty to Your Own Brand
Understanding which segments of consumers are loyal to your brand is becoming increasingly important. According to eMarketer, nearly four in 10 consumer products executives think brand loyalty will see a decline among consumers over the next two years.
As such, it’s even more important that you be able to identify your loyal consumers and hold on to them. Location intelligence can help you do so, by revealing which segments of consumers visit your stores exclusively, which visit a mix of your stores and your competitors’, and which visit exclusively your competitors’ locations.
Once you have that information, you can use it to target each segment accordingly. For example, if location intelligence reveals that the segment of consumers shopping exclusively at your brand is shrinking over a period of time, you could implement a loyalty program and promote it to that specific segment of consumers. You can then measure the success of that loyalty program with location analytics or attribution tools to see whether it, in fact, drove more consumers to store.
Loyalty to Competitor Brands
On the flip side, it’s equally as important that you understand how consumers interact with your competitors. Through location intelligence, you can measure the loyalty levels of consumers to your competitive set. This information is highly valuable because it can offer up new audience segments for you to target that you might not have identified otherwise.
For example, you can identify which segment of competitor consumers does not visit your brand and also does not have a strong preference for any brand in your category. This segment is the most vulnerable consumer audience from your competitive set — and thus provides a fantastic opportunity for conquesting. You can target that segment and then measure performance by analyzing whether or not your campaign was effective in driving more of your competitors’ consumers to your own brand.
In this way, brand loyalty can help you refine your audience targeting and inform your strategic planning for the future.
