Dr. Robert Cialdini argues that customer loyalty is economical and best built via co-creation activities that elicit commitment. He frames the mechanism through commitment-and-consistency: getting customers to take an initial action tied to their self-identity increases future aligned behavior. Empirically, asking customers to give "advice" (framing as collaboration) rather than an "opinion" on a business plan (example: a new restaurant) produces stronger support and greater intention to visit.
I think the idea of loyalty is crucial because it's so much more economical to bring back someone who's committed to and sold on the idea that you are promoting than to try to generate that commitment from someone who isn't there yet. So how do we install and maintain customer loyalty for our brand? And we do that, I think through co creation oriented activities with them. But there are proper ways to do that or more effective ways than other ways to do that. And we can find out and in on the most effective by the research process. Commitment and consistency. Getting people to undertake an initial action that is perceived by them as relevant to their social identities or to the things that are related to their view of themselves, their priorities, in the context of a bridge to the brand. So you get them to undertake an action with regard to the brand or the product, the service, because, because, and allow them to see the link between that action and, and the internal values that people have that lend themselves to congruent long term future action. So for example, let's take the case of co creation where we ask our customers, our clients, to help us develop the newest version of our products, the newest features for them, new directions that we should take. And that's been shown to be very powerful in producing a bond because people feel that they're collaborators with the organization and they have a sense of shared purpose as a consequence. Well, one study that I showed, I've actually talked about it at this conference earlier, is that if we ask our customers to co create the new product with us or the new direction for our organization by giving us their advice rather than their opinion on the topic, they become more supportive because they see themselves in a partnership role by virtue of the word advice. Advice means collaboration, means two people thinking together, they're complicit in this. And the research does show that when customers are shown a business plan for a new product, in this case it was a restaurant, a new kind of restaurant, and they were asked to provide their advice about it, they were then more likely to want to visit that restaurant than if they were asked to provide their opinion about that business plan.
