The Fallacy of Loyalty
Do you believe in lifetime customer loyalty? I don’t. Granted, there are exceptional cases where it does exist, but that’s like marriages that weather the time for five or more decades; the exception rather than the rule. I don’t understand how consultancies can freely abuse the term loyalty, even throw around a term even more audacious: ‘customer ownership’. But doesn’t that show their real attitude towards the customer? Isn’t that why real loyalty is so hard to ‘achieve’? I certainly think so.
As long as companies regard their customers as something ‘they own’, rather than something they have the pleasure of sharing a mutually beneficial time with, they will wonder why they can’t achieve loyalty – or only at great cost.
While still living in Germany, there once emerged a new term for boy- or girlfriend: “Lebensabschnittsgefährte”, which, rather facetiously, means ‘a partner for a specific period of your life’. ‘of your life’ and not ‘for life’, I may stress. The same I think is true for any business-customer relationship; the business shouldn’t even try to keep the customer for life, because in most cases this is simply impossible.
What they should be doing however, is to make the ‘specific period’ the customer shares with your company as pleasant and mutually beneficial as possible. The chances of the customer rewarding you with his/her loyalty are much higher as if you put ‘lifetime loyalty’ or ‘customer ownership’ as your credo. More than that, I believe that it is also much cheaper than desperately trying to get (often buy) the customers’ loyalty.
A recipe, perhaps? Just make sure that every contact I have with is a positive one. Don’t tell me you care about me, but still use the same ol’ advertising hype and lingo. Don’t try to find out every conceivable detail about my life if you aren’t even remotely interested in serving my individual needs. Above all, be honest and open. I don’t mind paying more for goods and services, but only if I know that you appreciate my custom, and don’t abuse me and what you know about me to squeeze even more money out of me.
