Is Uber a proof that customer loyalty still exists?
Is customer loyalty a thing of the past in the digital age? When I started Marketing, the pursuit of loyalty was everything. Loyal customers were the key to profitable business, with everyone taught at birth that the cost of acquiring a new customer was by some multiple considerably harder than keeping the ones you already have. Customer research often talked to “lapsed” purchasers in an often vain attempt to work out why they’d left. One magazine publisher would personally call anyone who cancelled their subscription to find out why. The feedback he got was better than any Focus Group’s. He'd usually follow up the call on whatever it was the lapsed purchaser had raised as issue. And more often than not, the customer renewed their subscription after taking his call. Al Ries, author of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing defined 'brand' as a “promise of consistency”, with the implicit guarantee that if marketing teams followed the rules of successful brand ...